The Daughters of the American Revolution are on the warpath, and King George help you if your ancestor signed the infamous Oath of Allegiance to the Crown.
That would’ve been in the wake of the rebels’ loss in the epic Battle of Long Island, naturally, and that ancestor simply may not have been patriotic enough, the argument goes.
The summer of 1776, was that battle. Two years later, William Tryon, the royal governor of New York, was bullying colonists by way of a posting in a New Haven newspaper: “The governor of the province recommends to the inhabitants of Suffolk County the following measures, as the best means for those who have been active in the rebellion to preserve their lives and save their estates. That all offensive arms, indiscriminately, be forthwith collected in each respective manor, township, and precinct, as soon as possible, to deliver up at headquarters, to the commander in chief of the king’s troops.” And so on.
Some here refused to sign any oath to the crown, and under threat they fled to Connecticut, among them Pelletreau, Hulbert, Gelston. Most, acting differently in self-preservation, stayed. All the famous names of the South Fork can be found among the signers: Sayre, Pierson, Post, Sanford, Howell, Halsey, Hildreth, Corwith, Cooper, Rogers, Topping, Foster, White, etc.
Of course, many of those same families had other members who did not sign and rebelliously took a leave of absence in the Nutmeg State. We are talking roughly an eight-year span, after all.
What’s more, they had all patriotically signed the Articles of Association in 1775, agreeing to boycott British goods. In Southampton Town, at least, apparently every single male over age 16 but two (a Paine and a Cook) signed onto those Articles.
Still, while not exactly purging the lists, the sticklers at the D.A.R. are gradually taking corrective measures: No new member can get into the organization using the names of men who signed the oath. History may run deep here, but not a whole heck of a lot seems to have been lost to the mists of time.
Yet if that’s all been made harder, the research these days is easier, what with the navigable databases and such. I always heard that my great-aunt Dot, from Rockland County, did exhaustive legwork to get herself in.
The new discovery vis-a-vis my own daughters, full disclosure, is that they’re doubled up, in a manner of D.A.R. speaking, as Peter Green (the e was added later), a French-born stone mason who built the forge at the Sterling Forest iron mine, where they made the chains that stretched across the Hudson, not only fought with the 1st New York Regiment under Col. Goose Van Schaick, his son Daniel served as a teenage private on numerous tours between 1776 and 1779.
Let’s get those forms in, girls. And in the meantime, keep your powder dry.