Volume 9 Issue 3 Fall 2002

William and Eliphalet, Tailor and Tavern Keepers

Windsor town records suggest that William Mitchelson arrived in Connecticut early in the eighteenth century. The first mention of William is in Windsor’s vital records, where his marriage to Mary Howard on April 26, 1713 is recorded. Land records show that three years later he purchased a house on a two-acre lot in Windsor from James Eno. In 1720 he began acquiring land in Simsbury’s Scotland area, which is now part of northern Bloomfield.

Volume 9 (misnamed as Volume 8) Issues 1-2 Spring-Summer 2002

Isaac Ensign (1747-1816), Grandfather of Ralph Hart Ensign

In 1770 a committee appointed by the Proprietors and Town of Simsbury laid out a lot “for the Use and Improvement of a blacksmith.” The “Blacksmith’s Lot” was bounded “East on the Highway [now Hopmeadow Street] North on the land of Jacob Pettibone South on a passway to be Left thirty feet wide Between Said Land and the Burying Yard [now Simsbury Cemetery] West at the foot of the Hill.” The committee, made up of Hezekiah Humphrey, John Case and John Owen, then released the land to Isaac Ensign, a blacksmith from Hartford. (Simsbury Town Records, Book 11, p.306)

Volume 8 Issue 3 Winter 2001-2002

His Contribution to Local Genealogical Resources

Anyone who researches a family who lived in Colonial Simsbury, or one of the towns that sprang from it after the Revolutionary War, will inevitably encounter the name Albert Carlos Bates. Bates’s book Simsbury, Connecticut: Births, Marriages, and Deaths Transcribed from the Town Records, commonly called the Simsbury vital records, is perhaps the reference book most used by researchers who come into the Simsbury Genealogical and Historical Research Library (SGHRL). The many transcriptions of public and private records that Bates published during his tenure as Librarian of the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford both preserved and made much more accessible the raw material from which genealogy and history are written.

Volume 8 Issue 2 Summer-Fall 2001

A Mercantile Venture in Colonial Simsbury

At the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford there is an account book that holds records for a general store and a sloop owned by Daniel Goodwin and his partner John Bigelow. The first page of the ledger states that the store opened on February 15, 1759 and that it was “in Simsbury in Connecticut in New England.” The partners were members of well established Hartford families. Daniel Goodwin was fifty-three years old and had earned the rank of Captain in the Hartford train band, or militia, and had served until 1755. He was a merchant in Hartford and John Bigelow was his nineteen-year-old stepson.