I am descended from a woman named Patience Irons on my mother's side. When my grandmother was still alive, she told me the story of her great-great Grandmother, Patience. The story of the woman with the strange name intrigued me. It so happens that I liked the name so much that Wendy and I named one of our daughters after her.
The story is that Patience's father was Reverend Jeremiah Irons. Rev. Irons was the founder of several Baptist churches as he made his way westward from Rhode Island. One of the churches he founded was the Baptist church in Yates Center. He's buried in the churchyard there.
We know that his wife was Abigail Bowen. Stories about Patience's daughter, Martha, talk about her marriage being performed by her grandfather, Jeremiah. It would appear that all of this is pretty straight forward. But many things in genealogy are not cut and dry.
The first wrench into this scenario is Jeremiah's age at Patience's birth date. He was born October 1764 in Nova Scotia. He would have only been 14 years, 7 months old at the time of her birth. That would make him only 13 years, 10 months old when she was conceived. Even with earlier ages for marriage at the the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, this seems extremely unlikely, especially for a man who ultimately became a Baptist minister.
The supposition then was that maybe Jeremiah adopted Patience. Considering he was a man of the cloth, this assumption may not be far from the truth. So, there must be another explanation. Jeremiah's wife, Abigail Bowen, would be the next logical place to search. She and Jeremiah were married 19 March 1790 in Rhode Island.
According to several family trees, Abigail Bowen was born 1 October 1769 in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, the daughter of Levi Bowen and Alethea Hicks. This would make her even younger than Jeremiah and even less likely to be the mother of Patience. The mystery deepens.
But wait a minute. Jeremiah and Abigail's granddaughter, Amanda Brown Tuttle, kept a diary that had important family dates written in it. She had Abigail's true birth date listed in it -- 2 January 1762. that would make her 17 years, 4 months, 4 days at the time of Patience's birth. This is a far more likely scenario for the parenthood of Patience. At the same time, this birth date excludes Abigail from being the daughter of Levi and Alethea.
Abigail's advanced age of 28 when she married Jeremiah is an unlikely age for a first marriage. Another supposition is that she was married before she married Jeremiah and that Patience is the daughter of that union. Since there was a war going on, perhaps that first husband died in that conflict and she married Irons afterwards. Was this mystery man Patience's true father and Jeremiah adopted her when he and Abigail wed?
As for Abigail, with the birth date supplied by Amanda's diary, there is no chance that she is the daughter of Levi and Alethea. So, the question now is, who are Abigail's parents? The mystery deepens. I cannot find an Abigail with the correct birth date in the Rhode Island Vital Records. However, I did find a record in Connecticut of an Ebenezer Bowen and Martha Young who had a daughter named Abigail in 1766.
A marriage record for Ebenezer and Martha states a year of 1761. Abigail could very well be the daughter of these Bowens. In addition, they were married in a Baptist church in Thompson, Connecticut, a mere 10 miles Jeremiah Irons' hometown of Foster, Rhode Island. Pieces are starting to come together.
Unfortunately we are left with just as many questions as when we started. Hopefully, once more records come to light after being locked away in some old town hall attic, more of this mystery can be solved. Until then, we will continue to wonder where the truth lies.
One interesting note is that nothing about Patience appears in Amanda's diary. If Patience was Abigail's natural daughter, she would be the half sister to the children of Jeremiah and Abigail who came later. However, Patience's absence among those pages indicate that it is likely she was a foster child of Jeremiah and Abigail.
Maybe some things we'll never know.
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