What a Difference an E Makes

By Bob Ferris

The Siege of La Rochelle that brought Peter and Marie together in Ireland.

My mother is always admonishing me to look at her side of the family as well as my father’s.  My excuse and passive resistance is likely seasoned with laziness as my late father’s branch is frequently better documented and easier to access.  But my mom is my mom, so I started by sorting my way through her Hammond line and their five, semi-sequential Thomases (1,2,3) starting in the late 1500s with an odd William and his wife Elizabeth Payne starting the American line in Massachusetts sometime before the 1640s—not to be confused with his brother or cousin Thomas who also hit the Colonies about the same time.  It was a little bit of a nightmare.

The hour was late and my brain fried, so then I thought that I would take a short detour with the Robb family as that surname was the source of the middle names for both my mother and older sister Caroline.  This seemed reasonable because it was a fairly simple line that appeared to stop with James Robb and his wife Margaret Barr who came to the Colonies from Newtownards, County Down, Ireland in 1773.  As I have not had wonderful luck tracing lines coming out of Ireland in the past this felt like a situation where I would make my few entries and then move on.

In digging I found that James Robb sometimes called Captain James Robb served in the Revolutionary War as a private.  That was interesting, but where did this "captain" business originate? Then I stumbled on the reason for James and a very pregnant "Maggie" hopping on a ship bound for America in the first place: James was a wanted man in Ireland having been arrested by King George’s soldiers for smuggling sassafras tea and then—with the help of friends—escaping from custody.  Maggie gave birth to James Jr. on the voyage to Philadelphia with her husband and two older sons.  They left one son named David with his grand-father David Barr and his wife Elinor (nee Nicholson).

I am not sure why this latter situation with David put me in mind of David Balfour of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped but David rejoined his family several years later.  Not only that, but he fought in the Battle of Tippecanoe along with brother James (see page 48 here), served in the War of 1812 and was elected to both state houses in Indiana eventually representing Indiana in the Constitutional Convention of 1818 (see here).

This story is pretty remarkable and only gets better when you understand that David Barr in some references cited as Lord David Barr was not really a Barr at all but came into this life as a “Barre.”  David was actually the son of two French Huguenots—Peter Barre and Marie Madelaine Raboteau—who escaped from the protestant strong-hold of  La Rochelle, France during the first half of the 18th century.

We know that Peter left his family and came to Ireland, but not many details are known about his exodus or fore-bearers.  We do not know about Marie’s ancestors either, but we do know about her flight from France.  It seems she was on the horns of a dilemma in France being given a choice between marrying a French Catholic man whom she did not love and being sent to a nunnery (see here).  She manufactured a third option when she found that her uncle who had already moved to Ireland had a ship in La Rochelle Harbor.  She had herself smuggled aboard the ship in a cask and then made the journey to the Emerald Isle.  There she met and married Peter and they had a son named David in 1722.

David had a brother Isaac born four years later who was educated at Trinity College and then entered the British Army. He came to America during the French and Indian Wars.  In fact, he was so prominent a figure in that effort that when Benjamin West painted his iconic work The Death of General Wolfe (above) at the battle of Quebec, Isaac Barre is in that painting right above General Howe holding the flag.

Col. Isaac Barre by Douglas Hamilton c. 1765

Isaac Barre then entered Parliament and opposed the taxation of the American Colonies even famously identifying the grumbling Whig colonists as the "Sons of Liberty" in a speech.  Isaac made such an impression on his colleagues and also the Colonists through these various efforts that the municipalities of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania (originally part of Connecticut), Barre, Massachusetts and Barre, Vermont were named in his honor.

Carlene cruising the Oregon Coast in her pink parka from Lenny's in Barre, VT.  

As Wilkes-Barre was founded in 1769, Maggie Barr when she and her family landed in Philadelphia passed relatively close to the growing city named for her uncle.  I wonder if she knew.  I know when my wife and I lived in Vermont and shopped at Lenny’s for discount clothing in Barre so we could survive our first winter, after stopping at the classically greasy Wayside Restaurant on the road from Montpelier to have our first (and last) Moxie cola, we had no ideal of the connection to long ago relatives.  Now when we don our Darn Tough socks or Carlene puts on her pink parka, I wonder if along with our friends from Vermont we will think too about James, Maggie, Peter, Marie, Isaac and the Davids.  I hope so.