Searching for the Maine Spears connection

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Fathers’ Day

My genealogy website is dedicated to my family – the ancestors of Ian, Sheila and Hazel Macnee.  But in honor of Father’s Day here is a glimpse of the other side of the family: the ancestors of Thomas Spear.  Unlike me, Tom was born in the USA, and can trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower through John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and to other early settlers such as the Turners of Scituate, the Whitmans of Pembroke, and the Spear family of Braintree and Quincy.  This the line I am interested in today, since it has a Maine connection.  

John Alden’s house, Duxbury, Massachusetts

We moved to Maine in 2013, having no awareness of any family history tying Tom to the state.  But there are large Spear families in Waldo County, and in the Brunswick area; there was a Thomas Spear shipyard right here in Arrowsic. There are Richard Spears and Robert Spears (the first names of Tom’s father and uncle) in abundance, and even a Capt. Richard who both looked like Tom’s father and had a maritime career which was remarkably similar.  

In 2010 the Rockland City Council, named a road in the port area the Capt. Spear Drive. After he died in 2018 the Maine State Ferry Service launched the Capt. Richard G. Spear ferry. 

George Spear (Spere, Speere and Speare), 1612-1688, is commonly considered to be the forebear of all the English Spears in the area – there being another Spear family of Irish origin.  George was born in England, but came to North America, was made a freeman of Boston in 1644, then settled in that part of  Braintree, Massachusetts, now known as Quincy. 

Tom Spear, Spear Street,

Quincy, Massachusetts

2007

George Spear married Mary Heath, 1627-1674, also from England, and together they had 10 children, 2 of whom died in infancy, another at age 15.  Tom is descended from their ninth child, Nathaniel, 1665-1728, who was born and died in Braintree, and his son, also Nathaniel, 1692-1732.  Nathaniel’s son Thomas, 1725-abt 1793, moved to Boston, where he married and raised his family of 7 children, including the first of four Johns.  John Spear I, 1749-1824, fathered John II, 1780-1809.  The latter was the father of John Murray Spear, 1804-1887, named after a preacher and founder of the Universalist Church, John Murray, and it the illustrious of this family line.

John Murray Spear was, like his namesake, a Universalist preacher.  In the 1840s, according to Wikipedia, Spear was active in petitioning for women’s rights, labor reform and the removal of the death penalty. Also a prominent abolitionist, Spear organized the first Universalist anti-slavery convention and helped to oversee the stretch of the Underground Railroad which ran through Boston, and worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas.  Later, however, Spear broke away from the Universalist Church, became a spiritualist, divorced his wife and moved to England with a woman he called his spiritual wife.  He eventually returned to the USA and died in Philadelphia in 1887.  

Tom’s Spear ancestry then continues to John Murray Spear II, 1835-1857; Samuel Green Spear 1877-1951, and his father Richard Turner Spear 1914-1939. But it is the Maine line of descendants of George Spear, that has us puzzled.

George Spear’s first wife, Mary Heath, Tom’s 8G grandmother, died in 1674 when two of their children were under ten years old.  Within a year George married another Mary, Mary Newcomb, with whom there were two more children, the second of whom lived only a day and whose death preceded his mother’s by one week, in 1678. This left George yet again with young motherless children, and again he soon remarried, to Elizabeth Gent.  The couple moved to New Dartmouth (now Pemaquid), Maine, where Elizabeth apparently had property, and it is there that their son, Robert, was born in 1682.   Six years later George was still living, and in New Dartmouth when he wrote a petition on "May ye 21th. 1688", but tradition has it that he was killed during the French and Indian wars (possibly in the Siege of Pemaquid in 1696).   The area was abandoned by the settlers for 30 years. His remains are probably, if buried, in a common unmarked grave in the area.

Fort Henry, Pemaquid, built 1692, destroyed in the 1696 Siege of Pemaquid. (Reconstruction built 1908.)

 While there are reports that his youngest son Robert lived not far from New Dartmouth, the only record is from a gravestone in the Maquoit Cemetery in nearby Brunswick.

Here lyes the body of

Mr ROBERT SPEER

who departed this life

January the 16th 1763

Aged 81 Years

 Sadly there is little to confirm the link between this Robert and George except the dates on this gravestone.  But a clearer line of descent flows from Ebenezer (1654-1719), George’s sixth child.  Ebenezer, and was great-grandfather of the Ebenezer Spear who was born at Braintree January 12, 1750, and who settled in Wells, Maine, and then removed to Litchfield about 1787 where he died Maine on March 18, 1821. He is considered to be the ancestor of the long line of Spears in Maine.

 So, while Tom is not descended from either Robert or Ebenezer, we do have a relationship to the extended family of Maine Spears.  Hopefully that is enough to establish that we are not ‘folks from away’ after all.