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| The County of Suffolk with Wortham at the center of the northern border. |
John Lanham, the immigrant,
was born on May 18, 1661, in Wortham, England, which is located in the county
of Suffolk. He was the son of Jonathan
Lanham (1630-1725) and Mary Marsh Lanham (1632-1705).
The times were perilous. King Charles II, having returned from exile
on the continent, had been crowned less than a month before John Lanham’s
birth. Charles’s father, King Charles I,
had been executed by the Puritan Parliament in 1649, and in the intervening
years, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell had established a Commonwealth, making
England a republic rather than a monarchy.
Following Cromwell’s death, the Commonwealth could not be sustained, and
Charles’s son, with a heart bent on revenge, returned to England from exile on
the continent to restore the monarchy and establish religious uniformity,
requiring conformity to the Anglican Church.
The times were not propitious for the religious Dissenters of the
country.
Little is known of John Lanham’s father or childhood, but
it is a matter of record that young John found his way to London and emigrated to the
New World as an indentured servant in 1678 at the age of only seventeen—not
even old enough to have graduated from high school had he been living today. He arrived in Port Tobacco, Maryland, on the
ship Dover, Captain John Harris
commanding, as a servant indentured to Col. Benjamin Rozier (variously spelled
as Rozer and Roser), who owned a plantation in Port Tobacco.
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What exactly did it mean to be
an “indentured servant”? Persons who
lacked the financial resources to pay passage to America could make their way
to the New World by signing a contract, or indenture, with a landowner already
in the colonies, who would pay for the emigrant’s passage in exchange for his
or her agreement to work for a defined period (usually four to seven years)
without pay. During the period of
indenture, in exchange for their labor, the land owner provided his indentured
servants with food, clothing, housing, and the all-important training they
would need when they struck out on their own.
When their term of servitude was complete, they were free to go their
own way to fulfill their American dream of freedom and self-determination.
To undertake an indenture was,
to be sure, a risk, as life was harsh and uncertain, and persons striking out with
indenture in hand could not know if they would even survive long enough to gain
their freedom. As depicted in Robert
Louis Stevenson’s novel, Kidnapped,
some unfortunates were unwillingly indentured, so for John Lanham to go willingly is a sign of
a very strong desire to leave England. What might have motivated him to put himself into the service of another person in a foreign land for perhaps
up to seven years? A look at the times
in which he lived will give us a clue.
With John Lanham’s location being Suffolk and the
year of his transportation to the New World, 1678, it is hard to neglect the
possibility that the Lanham family were religious Nonconformists, a term applied to those whose religious views departed
from the Church of England’s—folks such as Baptists, Congregationalists, and
Presbyterians. Suffolk had been the center of religious controversy
before, when the famous Puritan leader John Winthrop had left England for the
New World in 1630, twelve years before the beginning of the Civil War between
the Puritan Parliament and the Anglican (some would even say Catholic)
monarchy.
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| Coronation of Charles II, 1661 |
Cromwell’s Protectorate was, of course, Puritan in
its outlook (meaning it wished the Reformation of the Church to continue in
order to “purify” it of all non-biblical elements of medieval
Catholicism). However, after Charles
II took the throne in 1661, the Restoration began, a period when
the philosophy “eat, drink, and be merry” was lived out at Charles’s
court, and many who sought to practice a more serious way of life looked toward
the New World as their hope for the future.
Whether John Lanham’s motivation was religious
freedom or an improvement in his economic condition, his decision to sign on
for service in Maryland, in particular, is perhaps explained by the fact that
his cousin, Josiah Lanham, had left for Maryland ten years earlier in
1668. Josiah settled in Kent County,
Maryland, and became a well-respected member of the community, marrying the
daughter of Major James Ringold and serving as a justice of the peace.
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| Indentured servants harvesting tobacco in Tobacco Production by Sidney King |
Once the indentured servant had finished his
stipulated service, he would typically receive a new set of clothes along with
his “freedom dues,” a pre-arranged termination bonus which could be
land, money, or a gun. John Lanham may
have served a relatively short period of four years, as he appears in the
records in 1682 as a debtor to John Watkins of Anne Arundel County. Perhaps he had borrowed money as he set out
on his life of independence.
This loan and his own hard work apparently paid
off as, by 1686, he was a cattle owner, which is known from the fact that he
registered his cattle mark (brand) in Charles (now Prince George’s) County.
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| 17th-century Bride |
With stability within sight, he married a woman
named Dorothy, and their first child, John, Jr., was born in 1690. Genealogists have been unable to determine Dorothy’s
surname with any certainty—some noting it as Burch (the name of a well-known Prince George’s
County family) and others, as Shaw. Dr.
Howard G. Lanham in his work The Lanhams
of Maryland and the District of Columbia favors the name Shaw for the
following reason[1]:
On
March 19, 1710/1, John Lanham was a party to an agreement between Prince George’s
County resident Ralph Shaw, Sr., and the planter Edward Marlow, Sr., in which
Marlow agreed to provide life-long room
and board to Shaw and his wife, presumably an older couple who were seeking
retirement. In exchange for this room and board, Shaw signed over all his
personal belongings to Marlow. At the
same time, Shaw gave Lanham two cows and calves and half of all the grain
currently in his fields. Researcher Dr. Lanham believes that the equitable
division of his assets suggests that Ralph Shaw may have been the father-in-law
of both John Lanham and Edward Marlow.
Though this cannot be proved, it is probably as close as we can come to
identifying the family of Dorothy (or Dorotha,
as it appears in the records).
The
children of John and Dorothy Lanham who survived to
adulthood included the following:
1. John, Jr., (1690-1763)
2. Richard (1697-1750)
3. William (1699-1750)
4. Ralph (1701-1742)
(twin?)
5. Thomas (1701-1754)
(twin?)
As the years passed after his marriage, John
Lanham continued to advance and prosper.[2]
1694: On October 3, he was able to purchase a tract
of 219 acres of land called Oxmontown, originally patented to Lanham and
another man named William Hutchinson.
However, on October 18, Hutchinson assigned the land to Lanham
alone. This tract was on the Piscataway
Branch (or Creek), on the north side of which a town called Lanhams is depicted
in a map of 1794, which is probably the same place of the current Lanham,
Maryland, an unincorporated community with a population of just over 10,000
people.
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| Piscataway Creek with town of Lannhams just north (lower left quarter) from Map of the State of Maryland, 1794 |
1696: On April 10, he was asked to serve as witness to a deed, on which he made his characteristic mark (see at right). This request indicates that he was a man who had the respect of his neighbors.
1697: In November, he recorded registered marks for
cattle and hogs on behalf of his sons.[3]
1699: On May 15, John, Sr., was the administrator
of the inventory of Michael Kersey of Prince George’s County, perhaps a
neighbor.[4] In these last two documents, his
name is recorded as Lannum and Lennam, respectively, not uncommon in the era
before spelling was standardized and people wrote down what they thought they
heard.
1705: On May 13, John Lanham, now age 44, was granted a patent for Lannin’s
Addition, 200 acres in
Prince George’s County, which had been assigned to him by Luke Gardner, Jr., on October 13, 1704. The
land adjoined Stony Harbor.
The
subsequent deeds that appear in the records of Prince George’s County show that
at the age of 52, John was beginning to transfer his property to his sons.
1713: On September 22, John Lanham (now styled Senior) transferred the 100 acres of a
tract called Lanham’s Addition to his son, John Lanham, Jr., for “love
and affection.” Dorotha Lanham gave up dower rights to that property. About
three weeks earlier, the records show that John, Sr., had transferred a
100-acre tract simply called Addition
to his second son, Richard Lanham.
However, researcher Dr. Howard Lanham notes it is not clear if the Addition was
a different tract or the same one given the following September to John, Jr. No
other source mentions a Lanham-held tract simply called Addition. Four
years later, on November 16, 1717, Lanham’s
Addition was transferred to John, Jr., once again under the same terms: “for
love and affection” with Dorotha Lanham giving up her dower rights.
1729: On May 3, John Lanham, Sr., transferred Oxmontown, 95 acres, to his son Richard
again for “love and affection” with Dorotha Lanham, wife of John Lanham, Sr.
giving up her dower rights.
1744: On January 19, John Lanham, Sr., transferred the
remaining section of Oxmontown to his son Richard. In this case, the term “for love and
affection” was specified, but there was no mention of his wife giving up her
dower rights. The deed also mentioned that 45 acres were reserved for William
Lanham, John Sr.’s, third son.
John Lanham died in 1745 at the age of eighty-four. From the lot of a hungry lad of seventeen setting out on
rough seas to an uncertain future to the status of a prosperous landowner with a large family
and the respect of his community, John Lanham epitomizes the American ideal of
hard work, determination, and an upright life.
Interestingly, if he were buried near Lanham, Maryland, in Prince George’s
County, where his property was known to be, he lies interred just 19 miles
northeast of the resting place of his sixth great-grandson, Patric Levi Lanham
(1915-1954), a naval photographer of World War II who lies in Arlington
National Cemetery.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Requiem” seems to capture the family
bond:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you ’grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
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[1] “Controversies
in Lanham Genealogy. Topic Three: Who Was the Wife of John Lanham?” http://www.angelfire.com/md3/howardlanham/controversies/controversy3.html
[2] The details in this section were
discovered by Dr. Howard G. Lanham and presented in The Lanhams of Maryland and the District of Columbia. For complete
documentation, see: http://www.angelfire.com/md3/howardlanham/data/datalanhamj.html
[3]
This document is problematic in my opinion in that Dr. Lanham states that the
marks were made for John, Jr., Richard, and Thomas. However, Thomas was not born until 1701.
[4] 1658-1758. Charles County,
MD, Families “First 100 Years”: Wills, Court, Church, Land, Inventories, &
Accounts.
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