One of the enduring mysteries in our family was the identity
of Zilpha Griffin who was buried next to Samuel and Mercy Griffin in the Essex
Common Burial Ground. As is true in many of the cemeteries of that time you
find families buried in groups, in a family plot, as it were. Buried along one
row you find Samuel and Mercy Bailey Griffin, their son John and his two
children Truman Griffin and Chloe Griffin. Next to them is a headstone with the
inscription “June ye 11, AD 1799 In memory of Zilpha Griffin wife of Samuel
Griffin Jun’r in the 18 yr of her age”.
The condition of the headstone, which had become very deteriorated,
added to the mystery. When the cemetery
records were transcribed the transcriber wrote down a 48 adding parentheses
indicating some uncertainty. For us an age of 48 did not fit into any family
pattern that would allow us to establish her identity even though her headstone
identified her as the wife of a Samuel Griffin. We were all left to puzzle over
the fact that we seemed to be missing something. We all were haunted by the
fact that if she was in fact the wife of Samuel Griffin Jun’r she was being
kept out of the family circle. With the discovery of additional information we
came to realize the misread 48 was in fact an 18. If her age at
the time of her death was 18 then she must have indeed been the first wife of
Samuel Griffin identified on her headstone as Samuel Griffin Jun’r who later
married Sylvia Bradley. This also helped explain the name of Samuel’s first
child a daughter who he named Zilpha Griffin. We considered the fact that the
child Zilpha may have been named after her mother who may have died in
childbirth. But in the 1800 Census there
are no children in Samuel and Sylvia’s household. So Zilpha Griffin the
daughter of Sylvia Bradley was named in memory of Zilpha Buell an act of real
family compassion from a second wife.
So how did we discover the identity of Zilpha Buell Griffin?
On one trip to the Genealogy Library I found myself with a little extra time. I
had been thinking of adding a little Essex flavor to the Blog. On the spur of
the moment I decided to spend a little time going through the town records,
which I had not visited for some time. In the back of Volume Two I ran across
twenty or so pages of family records from the earliest days in Essex that I did
not ever remember seeing. They were organized under the name of the head of the
house. At some point a town clerk had gathered all of the information on a
family and entered it as a single grouping of information, births, deaths and
marriages. As I surveyed the material looking for family names a random name
caught my attention, Orange Buell. The heading was for the family of Samuel and
Rachel Buell. It listed four children born in Essex one of which one was
Orange, and on the far right it listed family death records one of which read “Zilpha
Buell, June 11, 1799”. The name Zilpha and the date 1799 jumped out at me. That
was a name and a date that I was familiar with, “Zilpha Griffin, June 11, 1799
wife of Samuel Griffin Jun’r” from the Essex Common Burial Ground. Intrigued by
the fact that I had found a Zilpha and a date of 1799 all in the very small
town of Essex I had the profound impression that I had solved the puzzle.
Following up on the lead I discovered that the family of Samuel Buell had moved
to Essex from Killingworth arriving a little earlier than the Griffins. It is
almost a certainty that they would have known each other. In Killingworth Zilpha’s date of birth is
recorded as “Zilpha Buell daughter of
Samuel & Rachael born July 3, 1781” which would make her 18 in 1799. We had
discovered the identity of our Zilpha. Found on a day in which I had not even
considered her name, in a film I had picked randomly out of several
possibilities, in a record that I had not even suspected existed, under a name,
which held no family connection. A name crying out from beyond the veil, found
without anyone looking, Zilpha Buell Griffin.
