Ives Family History Blog

The Military Treason Trial of Sarah Hutchins

Ken Ives recently sent me this material through a comment and I wanted to elevate it to a post so it would be more accessible. It is much appreciated. What follows came from Ken.

There's an article in the spring edition of the National Archives' "Prologue" magazine that Ives researchers may find interesting. It is titled "All for a Sword: The Military Treason Trial of Sarah Hutchins". There's an on-line version of the article at the above link While the article focuses on the treason trial of

Sarah Hutchins, a Baltimore woman, near the end of the Civil War, it also discusses briefly the closely-related treason trial a New York stock broker named William Ives. This was William Jay Ives, b. abt 1833, son of Ansel Wilmot Ives. Though he was from New York, his family straddled the line during the war. His brother, Joseph, was a Colonel in the Confederate army, and an aide to Confederate president Jeff Davis.

He had another brother, Leonard, also in the Confederate army, who was mortally wounded at Gettysburg (and figures in the article). A third brother, David, served in the Union army. And finally, his brother Malcolm Ives was a war correspondent for the New York Herald, who was at one point charged with spying and imprisoned for several months, then released without a trial.

Ken also posted this on Ancestry, but your site may reach a somewhat different audience. He thinks it should be publicized because it is, as far as he knows, a completely unknown chapter in our family history. The research backing the article is quite good, done using primary sources, by a professor of history at Christopher Newport College in Virginia, and it fits perfectly with other information my own research has found on William Jay Ives and his siblings. He closed by thanking me ever so much for hosting this site, and especially for bringing Richard Ives' great work on the early Ives family to the rest of us.

 

 

Some More Information on William Ives in England

Richard Ives continues do some great work on the origins of our William Ives in England. We know for sure he boarded the True Love at age 28 to sail to the New World.  There are various theories on what happen before then. Here is one post on it - New Clues on the Parents of William Ives (1607 – 1648).

Richard wrote me recently, “In a will made drawn up in 1628, Thomas Ives, a well to do inhabitant of Langham, Rutland, dispossessed his eldest son, Wiliam Ives, making a big deal of leaving him precisely one shilling in his will. To his other sons, Thomas left £15 a piece. This was seven years before "our" William Ives left England, but I think it is interesting to note that in 1628, the year William Ives of Rutland was dispossessed, "our" William was 21 years old - a fact that may have impelled to Thomas Ives of Rutland to make his intentions in regard to his estate clear. Are William Ives of Rutland and William Ives, Boston immigrant the same person?”  He added in, "The Parish Map of 1624," you will find the Thomas Ives ("Iues") residence smack in the middle of Langham, the location of which can still be pinpointed in the town today see below.

 

In a second message Richard found the baptismal records of Langham Parish and he was able to locate William's baptismal record. He was born March 21, 1607, which would make him 28 years old in 1635, the age of our William Ives.

The then picture clouds a bit as Richard added in a third message - David Ives, an expert genealogist, discovered in the Langham Parish Burial Records a record of a "William Ives" being buried at Rutland on September 10, 1639.  No age or family connection of the deceased is provided.

Although this certainly does complicate matters, David and I agree that, far from discarding the notion that William Ives of Rutland is "our" William Ives, we ought to continue looking into the case. There are several reasons why we have come to this conclusion.

The first is, simply, that as far as we know, after a century and a half of numerous American members of the Ives family examining original documents in England, William Ives of Rutland is (as far as we know) the first whose date of birth exactly matches the age given by "our" William Ives to the King's agent the day he boarded the "Truelove." It is, of course, entirely possible that there were two William Ives of the same age living in England at the time, but the fact that the date of birth of William Ives of Rutland perfectly matches that of  "our" William remains powerfully suggestive.

The second is that if the "William Ives" who was buried in Langham on September 10, 1639, is the son of Thomas Ives of Langham, then a curious picture emerges. Born in 1607, William Ives of Rutland is disinherited at age 21, left with only a shilling in his father's will. Despite this, he either goes on living in Langham (or returns there later in life) and dies in the village in 1639 at age 32. For us, this scenario is little short of bizarre. It is nearly impossible to imagine a disinherited and shamed son continuing to live in Langham for 11 years after his stunning disinheritance. For one thing, with no property or money inherited from his father, how would he have made a living? As for the possibility of William leaving Langham and returning later, the idea that William, the prodigal son, left Langham after his disinheritance at age 21, only to return later and die at age 32 (death bed reconciliations notwithstanding), seems pretty unlikely as well.

Our conclusion is that the September, 1639, William Ives burial record for Langham may well refer to a child (baptized because he has a name) who was a nephew or cousin of the William Ives of Langham, born in 1607. The problematic bit of this theory, of course, is that there is no surviving baptismal record from Langham that we have been able to find so far for any such  child.

Richard concluded - So, there you have it. Unfortunately, "our" William Ives still refuses to reveal his origins in a conclusive way and remains, as they say down South, "as slippery as an eel in a barrel of oil."

Thanks to Richard for this great work and I wanted to share it with you in this post.