Who she is. Dorcas married William Voudy at York in 1803 and was the mother of Lydia Jane Voudy — who married John Dudley, whose daughter Mary married Edward Schmidt. She is the grandmother of that Mary, and the point at which this family's Maine ancestry either holds together or does not.
Where. York village, and a nine-acre farm on the south side of the York river.
Everything this family knows about its Maine roots passes through one woman, and she left less paper behind her than anyone else in this archive.
No birth record. No death record. No notice in a newspaper. No signature that is certainly hers. Her surname reaches us squeezed in above a line, in 1803.
William Voudy and Dorcas ^Booker both of York intend marriage — entered Oct.r 6.th 1803.
That little ^ is a caret — the mark a writer makes to show where a word he left out should go. Her surname is not on the line. It is above it.
⛔ The first close look at this raised the alarm. The inserted word was described as being in a smaller, darker, different hand — meaning somebody later had supplied a surname the original clerk never wrote. If that were true it would knock the leg out from under everything built on her.
⭐ That reading was wrong, and catching it was the better piece of work. The page was downloaded at full resolution and examined at three and six times enlargement. Same ink. Same pen width. And the letter shapes match — compare the capital B of the inserted Booker with the capital B of Both, three words further along the same line.
It is the clerk's own caret, made as he was writing. He left her surname out, noticed, and put it in.
⚑ The entry then ends with a small tick and nothing else — no wedding date, no minister. Which is worth noticing, because two entries above hers, in the same hand on the same page, he did write the marriage in afterwards.
1817 to 1820 — the man believed to be her father mortgages his whole nine-acre farm three times in three years and never pays it off. The first of those mortgages is to William Voudy, mariner — her husband. ⛔ It supports the idea that she was Aaron Booker's daughter. It does not say so, and no deed in the whole chain uses the words son-in-law.
1850 — the census, and the only original source anyone has ever found for her age. William Voudy 70, fisherman; Dorcas 64, sharing the house with their grown son Reuben, his wife and their baby. Sixty-four in 1850 means born about 1785 — which fits a marriage in 1803 exactly. She was seventeen when she married.
1860 — two Voudy households two doors apart on one page of the York census. In one, their son William Junior with his family. In the other: William Voudy 82, Dorcas 64. No occupation, no property, nobody else in the house. An old couple living alone, a few doors from their son.
⚠ Sixty-four again, ten years later. She cannot have been sixty-four twice. The 1803 marriage settles which is right — a woman married in 1803 was not born in 1796 — so the 1850 age stands and the 1860 one is simply wrong.
September 1868 — a deed her husband made twenty years earlier is finally entered in the register. ⛔ That is a filing date, not a life date. The deed was executed on 11 April 1848, and the reservation "during my life and her life" proves only that Dorcas was living then. A recording says nothing about who is alive on the day it happens. So the last evidence of her life remains the 1860 census above.
An empty search is only worth as much as its stated boundaries, so here they are.
The York town death register runs from 1717 to 1889 and is searchable end to end. A sweep of the surname across every York record returns 154 hits — deeds, court files, probate papers, marriage entries, an index, a ship's mortgage. Not one death entry, for her or for any Voudy at all.
The newspapers, under five spellings of her name, returned nothing — ⭐ and the reason that sentence can be trusted is the control: "Portsmouth Navy Yard", searched in the same sitting, returns over a hundred thousand hits. The archive was working. She simply is not in it.
And there is no York birth record for any child of Aaron Booker. Not one, for any of them. His only entry in the entire town book is his own marriage announcement of 1778. Whatever finally proves Dorcas was his daughter, it will not be a birth record, because his children do not have any.
C-36, D-29, V-93, V-20, X-ELLINGWOOD, V-101, V-52.p07-dorcas-voudy.md · do not edit this file —
edit the Markdown and re-run md2html.py