Zilpha Buell Griffin

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.