Category: Bagg

Death by Lightning

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Threatening clouds (JH photo)

A friend recently discovered that her seven-times great-grandfather died when he was shot by someone who mistook him for a bear near Montreal in 1686. Needless to say, she was thrilled with that discovery. I can’t top that, but I did run across the bizarre deaths of brothers James Bagg and Jonathan Bagg in Suffield, Connecticut in 1766, and an even more unusual account of that event. 

I found a reference online to “A short Account of Three Men that were killed by Lightning, at Suffield, Viz. Samuel Remington, James Bagg, Jonathan Bagg.” I expected it to be a newspaper article, but it is actually a long poem, published in 1767, that only briefly recounts the actual event. Most of the 41 four-line verses are a warning to the living to be ready for death. I suppose this is not surprising. Death often came unexpectedly to the colonists of New England, whether from an accident or disease.  

The poem set up the scene:

‘Twas on the Twentieth Day of May;
These Men were in their Prime;
And by permission cruel Death
Did Snatch them out of time.
Two of the Men that Day rode forth
And left their Friends at Home,
And not thinking but to return
When they their Work had done,
But God’s Almighty Sovereign Hand
Did not intend it so;
He did intend their mortal Souls
Before his Bar should go.

It described the brothers: 

Two of those Men had great
Prospects,Of Tables richly spread;
They may be round their Father’s Board,
Eating his heavenly bread.
These are two Men were scarcely found
In a vain Company,
From foolish Talking fun and light,
They did themselves deny,
They were not free from satan’s snares
while they were here below,
Eor he unguardedly steps in,
his snares are spread so low.

There was a comforting message:

One word to you that mourners are,
Cheer up and do not weep,
Hoping at the great judgement day
They’re found among Christ’s sheep.

The poem concluded with a stern reminder:

You that are not prepared now,
may read these lines with dread,
Who thinks the Lord will on us wait,
but likewise strike us dead.
And you that are prepar’d to go,
Will sing with great surprize,
While Sinners weep and rowl and roar
With weeping hearts and eyes.
Death always flies with wings unseen
to those that sleep secure,
And hungry death, with cruel graves,
both old and young devour.

There is a fuller account of the lightning strike that killed these men in an interview with a woman who searches for gravestone inscriptions that describe accidental deaths. Judi Trainor explained that brothers James and Jonathan Bagg, both in their late teens, were working in a field when they saw a storm approach. They ran to a nearby house and were sitting by the fireplace when they were struck. Today it is unusual for lightning to kill people indoors, but at that time, people did not understand the nature of lightning and the need to ground buildings.

James and Jonathan were born in West Springfield, Massachusetts, about 10 miles north of Suffield, Connecticut. According to West Springfield Births, they were the sons of James Bagg and his wife Bathsheba Dewey, who had been married in Springfield in 1744. James was baptized on March 15, 1746-7, Jonathan two years later. 

James, Jonathan and their sister Bathsheba would have been distant cousins to my four-times great-grandfather Phineas Bagg, who was born in nearby Westfield, MA, around 1750. Their great-grandparents John Bagg and Hannah Burt, who married in Springfield in 1657, were their common ancestors. 

The headstone inscriptions of James and Jonathan are online, however, there is a discrepancy: the inscriptions say the young men were the sons of Jonathan Bagg, rather than James. Both inscriptions read, “son of Jonathan, late of Springfield, & of Bathsheba, now wife of Captain Asaph Leavitt; died May 20, 1766.” 

The mistake about the boys’ father probably appeared when the stone was engraved because James Bagg had died many years before, in 1749, aged 48, in West Springfield. His death would also explain why the couple had only three children. Mrs. Bathsheba Bagg married Capt. Leavitt in 1762.

Research notes: The account of the death of Claude Jodouin in 1686 can be found in the Bulletin des Recherches Historiques, Vol 41, p. 39, (otherwise known as the BRH), available at the library of La Société Généalogique canadienne-française  (http://www.sgcf.com) in Montreal. You can read the full story at http://genealogyensemble.wordpress.com/2014/05/05/life-in-new-france-was-fraught-with-danger/

A short Account of Three Men that were killed by Lightning, at Suffield, Viz. Samuel Remington, James Bagg, Jonathan Bagg was printed and sold by Timothy Green, New London, 1767. It is not indicated whether Timothy Green also wrote it. A Google search brings up many references to this document, but some don’t actually link to an online copy. I found it on microfiche at the McGill University library, but an online copy described as A Loud Call to the Living is available through the Library of Congress website Memory of America, An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and other printed Ephemera.

“A Sudden and Awful Manner”, an interview with Judi Trainor, written by Ben Shattuck, appeared in the online magazine The Morning News, Sept 11, 2013. http://www.themorningnews.org/article/a-sudden-and-awful-manner

Births, marriages and deaths in early Massachusetts are generally well documented. West Springfield records can be found in the database Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 on Ancestry.com, and in the members-only section of online databases of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), www.AmericanAncestors.org.

The headstone inscriptions of Suffield, Connecticut, 1660-1937 can be found at:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kathycamp/Index/Page172.htm.

Clara’s Wedding Veil

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Robert Stanley Bagg and Clara Smithers

A few weeks ago, when I was writing an article about the 1882 wedding of Clara Smithers and Robert Stanley Bagg in Montreal, I remembered that I had something that might have belonged to Clara. In the cedar chest there was a dilapidated cardboard box that my mother had told me contained her wedding veil. Hand-written labels identified the contents as the wedding veil that had belonged to my grandmother, and that my mother also wore. 

According to newspaper accounts of their respective weddings, my great aunt also wore it, as did her daughter. These sources mentioned that the veil had been Clara’s, and that it had originally been her mother’s. Clara’s mother, Martha B. Shearman, was married in Waterford, Ireland in 1844, so not only had this veil been used by many members of the family, it was very old.

I contacted Cynthia Cooper, who is in charge of the costume and textile collections at the McCord Museum, to see whether the museum would be interested in acquiring it. The McCord already has a collection of documents primarily relating to early 19th century merchants Stanley and Abner Bagg. Cynthia told me that the museum also has Clara’s wedding dress. She was excited that the veil and the dress would be reunited at least 60 years after my cousins donated the dress.

The veil was completely wrapped in dark blue tissue paper, folded and tied up with string in three places. The little bit of lace peeking out at the top appeared to be in good condition. I decided not to unwrap it until I got to the museum. When we arrived, Cynthia noted down some background information on her computer, then she carefully untied the string and opened the tissue paper to reveal the object inside.  

We were amazed to see a large, triangular-shaped piece of flower-patterned lace. Then Cynthia searched for images of the veil among the museum’s vast photo collection, and in the photos I had sent her. We compared the wedding photos of Clara, my grandmother, my grandmother’s niece and my mother on their wedding days. There was no doubt about it: they were all wearing the same veil — and they were not wearing the lace shawl on the desk. 

Cynthia Cooper, of the McCord Museum, and I examine this lovely piece of lace.

As often happens in family research, you make a discovery only to find it opens up more questions than you had before. I can imagine how the mistake happened: if my mother was the last person to use the veil, my grandmother must have mislabelled it when she put it away. But where is the veil now? Does it still exist? 

And what is the shawl’s story? It is clearly old, but who owned it? Did it once belong to Clara Bagg, or could it, perhaps, have belonged to one of my grandmother’s aunts? Aunt Amelia Bagg is a possible candidate, since she was married twice but had no children. Maybe it belonged to a member of my grandfather’s family, or perhaps my grandmother purchased it herself.

Beautiful as the shawl is, I was disappointed to discover this was not Clara’s wedding veil, and so was Cynthia. She had clearly hoped to reunite it with the dress. She did take us to the costume vaults to show us Clara’s wedding dress, which, to my surprise, was not white, but ivory and yellow. That must have been a common fashion of the times, but it was not something I had been aware of.

As we left, Cynthia promised to research the shawl to find out what kind of lace it is made of, and to date it. She will let me know in a few months whether the museum will keep it.

Photo Credits:

1. Mr and Mrs. Robert Stanley Clark Bagg, Montreal, 1882, copyright McCord Museum, http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/II-66753.1

2. photo by Harold Rosenberg