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Historical Records of Indians in the Far Northeast – Digital Atlas (HRIFNE-DA)

We created HRIFNE-DA to provide ready access to a comprehensive dataset of references to individual Indians recorded in publicly available archival and printed who lived in the Far Northeast between AD 1600, when routine European voyages and attempts at settlement began there, to around 1850, when the abundance of such sources overwhelmed our ability to record them.

While this dataset is not truly exhaustive, we are confident that on the four decades of research it represents, found in repositories throughout North America, England and France, it has captured the great majority of such references.  They are assembled here in a searchable format that promises to be a powerful tool for refining our understanding of the region’s indigenous population.

The dataset is organized around mentions of individuals, to which is added other pertinent information found in the original record.  Most mentions have been subdivided into common categories to facilitate particular research interests.  These categories include land transfers, vital records, land transfers and a wide variety of life events that were regarded by the recorder as worth including in the mention. recording.  

These data can be considered in relation to a timeline of external events that may have had significant impacts upon indigenous peoples across the entire region, such as European Wars, disease epidemics and missionary activities.

HRIFNE-DA also provides a cartographic interface that locates the places in which these events took place, including places of residence, vital events, treaty signings, etc.  There remain a few place names that have yet to identified.  Finally, HRIFNE-DA provides links to images that pertain to mentioned individuals and places.  Most images can be viewed in larger formats if desired and downloaded for other uses.  

From the HOMEPAGE the data can be viewed either in Table View or Index View.

Table View:

HRIFNE-DA data are entered in the form of “items,” each pertaining to an individual mentioned in an historical document that connects the person to an event, along with other available information such as the event date, location, the individual's place of residence, kindred, etc.  The sources from which this information was recorded are also provided.  In cases where the sources may be hard access, a secondary source is sometimes also provided.  Most sources are grouped into categories as an aid to users may have special interests, such as vital records, censuses, deeds, military records, etc.  

Also accessible in Table View are Images, most of which are associated with one or more item.  They can also be viewed in Index View in connection to their associated mentions/items.  We have made every effort to abide by the access rules of the websites that made these images available, so their further use by HRIFNE-DA users should require no further permissions.

Clicking on Event will list all events alphabetically.  Event dates are given as mm/dd/year.  In the few cases where an important event date is not known with precision, the integers are replaced with "0".  The listed date refers to the exact date when known or to the date when an event, such as when the earlier death of an individual was recorded.  We also have attempted some standardization of dates according to the Gregorian calendar adopted in Great Britain in 1752.  Thus, dates from January and February in years prior to 1752 were advanced to the next year.

Clicking on an individual event will reveal its details, including all individuals associated with it.  For example, the above-mentioned Ababich was metioned only once, clicking on the event with which he is associated will reveal all the other individuals associated that event, in this case all the other warriors who joined the Micmac chief Membertou in a raid upon an Almouchiquois village at Saco, Maine in 1607.

Clicking on Person in either List View or Index View will produce a list of all Persons.  Clicking on any individual person will provide a list of all information pertaining to that person, including:

- manuscript name variants

- relatives

- places (Event and Vital)

- dates

- aliases

- lifespan (NB Lifespans >80 years suggest that more than one individual is likely included under that PERSON.

- record numbers pertaining to the person

- events and mentions with which the person is associated

- all sources that mention he person

See more information on Person under Index View below.

Clicking on Person with Family will reveal all persons whose relatives were recorded, where and when this information was recorded, and which records/items contain this information.  

Clicking on Mention?  Not important??

Clicking on Manuscript will produce a list of the 837 sources actually cited.  Notice that the reference list includes 1000 citations.  While all 1000 were originally consulted regarding the identification of individuals, many were displaced by sources we deemed more authoritative or easier to access.

Clicking on Images will produce a list of all images, but not the items with which they are associated.

Clicking on Has Place Event and Place Vital will produce a list of all items for which both were recorded.  Important?

Index View:

Most users will find Index View especially useful for exploring relational connections among items.

Person:  As stated above, clicking on Person in either List View or Index View will produce an identical list of all Persons.  The number of items pertaining to a person varies widely.  Some person references are unique, appearing in only one mention, e.g. Ababich, while others appear in many, e.g. Madocakwando (136 mentions).  

Defining the relationship between individuals and Persons proved problematic.  In some cases a Person might be associated with more than one individual.  For example, A. Abraham could refer to Andrew Abraham Sr. or Jr. and an individual whose name is given as Jean Baptisite record might refer to a great many individuals.

Another potential source of confusion is variability in naming patterns in different regions over time.  Aboriginal naming patterns throughout the Far Northeast tended to use mononyms, which were usually unique and attributable to a single person (e.g. Membertou, Skiteryguset, Squando, Squa Sachem, Waban).  However, some mononyms were adopted by individuals in subsequent generations (e.g. Moxis, Madockawando) and some individuals with mononyms might have been identified alternatively by aliases and sobriquets, e.g. Moxis AKA Agamogus.  More difficult by far was distinguishing individuals who eventually adopted European naming patterns.  This was particularly the case for Francophone names where a small number of baptismal names was used with great frequency, such as Francois, Joseph, Louis, Anne, Elisabeth and Marie.

We dealt with these difficulties by creating three name categories, a standard name (STDNAME), a unique identifier (UNIQUE ID), and name as it originally appeared in the mention (MS NAME).  When available, we also include aliases/sobriquets (ALIAS).  So, for example, our extensive experience with Francophone names lets us understand that an individual recorded as Lola Sockabasin should be rendered as Laurent Jacques Vincent.  Thus, he would be assigned the STDNAME Jacques Vincent, the UNIQUE ID Laurent Jacques Vincent, but an MS NAME as it was originally recorded.  These kinds of "misspelled" names are particularly common in Maine, Quebec and the Maritimes where baptismal names were recorded by French-speaking clergy, pronounced in local dalects by native speakers and then later written down by anglophone scribes.

As the given name/surname pattern became predominant in the early eighteenth century, so too did duplicate name combinations, especially with Francophone names. For example, a name recorded as Jean Pierre could be a double given name or Jean, son of Pierre.  In these cases, we consulted additional data available in the mention, such as place of residence (Place Vital) apparent life span (assumed to rarely exceed 80 years) and parental names, differentiating identically named persons numerically, e. g.  Jacques Vincent 1, 2, etc.

Female Francophone names posed an additional problem, that of name changes over a lifespan.  For example, Marie Francois (Marie, daughter of Francois) from Meductic baptized in 1750 is possibly the same person as Marie Bernard (Marie, daughter of Francois but now wife of Bernard) from Meductic in 1775, but not the same as Marie Bernard who was buried there in 1850 because she was unlikely to have had a lifespan of 100 years.

In sum, we acknowledge the limitations of these methods for sorting out individual persons.  However, we are confident that users with more focused geographic and chronological interests will be able improve upon our resolutions.

Places

Most mentions contain information of the event location.  When possible, we classified these locations as Pkace Vital for places of residence or Place Event for places where an event occurred.  In some cases, both types of place could be specified. Thus, a person who resided at the "praying town" of Natick in Massachusetts might have signed a grant to a parcel of land in Marlboro, Massachusetts.  In such cases Natick would be entered for PLACE VITAL and Marlborough for PLACE EVENT.

Used in combination with Person, Place Vital and Place Event can track life trajectories of recorded individuals. For example, a man named James Speen was primarily identified as a resident of Natick, Massachusetts, but he also appears resident in three other settlements and partook in events at several others.   Conversely, under Natick are listed all individuals who were said to reside there or who were associated with an event recorded for that place.

Alias

Alias includes secondary names recorded in a mention, sobriquets, epithets, and names used in specific contexts.  They are helpful in identifying instances where what appear to be two individuals actually designate a single person.  One such instance is that of an important person from the Kennebec River area of Maine who was commonly named Robinhood or Robin Hood, but who was also called Mohotowormet.  Another is Poquanum who, in 1633, granted land at Nahant, Massachusetts to William Dexter, but was later hanged at Richmond Island, Maine as Black William or Black Will.  Female examples include the Penobscot Molly Molasses who was baptized Marie Pelagie, and the Abenaki woman baptized as Marie Agathe but was commonly known by the mispronounced Moliocket.  

Ethnicity:

Ethnicity was attributed to a named individual on the basis of information contained in the mention.  For example, although Madockawando was most often referred to as a Penobscot, during the 1690s he was called a Maliseet.  Farther to the south, Hannah Wiser was associated with the Massachusetts "praying town" of Natick, but by 1775 was referred to as resident at Hassamesit.

Kinship (Kinsman Kind, Kin, Reltokin)

Kinsman Kind reveals the numbers of sums the kinds of kin identified in the mentions. Detailed information on kinship is found in two categories, Kinsman, which identifies a related person, and Reltokin, which specifies the relationship between the two persons.  We caution users to understand that some terms of kinship, such as cousin, uncle, niece, nephew may not have had the same aboriginal meaning as they do in modern kinship terminology.

To date, scholarship regarding Indians in the Far northeast has dealt only in passing with kinship at the level of individuals, with only occasional reference to spouses, parents, children and sometimes siblings.  However, we have found that the historical record contains a surprising abundance of information on kinship which researchers interested in social structure and community composition should find helpful.

While we cannot fully anticipate the range of inquiries that will be made of HRIFNE-DA, we can offer some general examples:

1. Mention categories.  Because the event category can refer to a very wide variety of occurrences, we found it potentially useful to subdivide them into broad categories.  The most common category refers to vital records such as a births, deaths/burials, baptisms, confirmations and marriages, which will be helpful to users concerned with kinship and community composition.  Community composition can also be directly addressed by focusing upon events pertaining to censuses data and provision lists.  The categories "conflict" and "diplomacy." "Legal" and "land" can orient users to questions about the transfer of lands between Indians and settlers, and in some areas like central Massachusetts and Quebec, also between Indians.  

2.  Assessing the historical importance of individuals.  The number of event citations recorded for an individual can serve as a general and         quantifiable indication of an individuals impact upon both indigenous and Euroamerican communities.  For just a few prominent examples, among the Indians mentioned by early Massachusetts colonists, members of the Waban family stand out (125 mentions) while to the north, in Maine, the same is true of Madockawando (72 mentions).  Farther to the north, New England boy captive Samuel Gill was carried off to and adopted into the community of Odanak, Quebec, where he married another English captive.  What is striking about their case (969 mentions) is the dominant role they and their descendants came to play in this putatively Indian        community.

Other interesting information can also be derived from those individuals less often mentioned.  Two illustrative examples are Nescombewet and the brothers Saint Aubin.  

Nescombewet was apparently born in the Lake Sebago region of Maine and, for a brief time, served as chief sagamore of the (probably Mahican) village of Amasocontee at Farmington Falls, Me.  However, in his career as a warrior, he also lived for a time with the Fox Indians in the Great Lakes region, fought alongside Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville in raids against English settlements in Newfoundland, and thus gained an audience at Versailles with French King Louis XIV.  

The Saint Aubin brothers, Ambroise and Charles, were sons of Jean Serreau de Saint Aubin who settled in the Passamaquoddy Bay area around 1676.  While his daughter married an Acadian man, the brothers married Maliseet women, Ambroise becoming a prominent sagamore among them and his brother Charles spawning a Saint Aubin lineage at Wolinak, near Becancour, Quebec.  Such marriages between Acadian men and Indian women were common, particularly in Acadia, which explains the frequency of French surnames among the Micmacs and, to a lesser extent, communities to their west as far as the Penobscot River.

2.  Defining spheres of activity:

Indians of the Far Northeast lived in a world increasingly torn between the English colonies of New England and New York to the south and the rival French colonies Nouvelle France and Acadia to the north.  The two regions thus produced separate sets of historical documents, and  most scholarship has tended to focus unequally upon these source groups.  However, by combining the two, HRIFNE-DA allows us to consider the wider connections some individuals established across this strife-torn region.  Two examples of this kind of bipolar social navigation are Sheepscot John and Derumkin.  

Although formerly a disciple of the Massachusetts Protestant missionary John Eliot, by the 1680s Sheepscot John appears to have shifted his residence eastward, first to the Casco Bay area, then to Taconic (Winslow) on the Kennebec, then to his namesake Sheepscot River and         finally to the Penobscot area.  These connections, and probably his ability to speak English, seem to have given him a degree diplomatic influence since his sons later served as hostages in Boston during the tense years of King William's War.

Derumkin, aka Sagamore John, is known to scholars as the grantor of many deeds to English settlers for lands in the lower Kennebec and Merrymeeting Bay areas.  Despite the multiple periods of English-Indian hostility he lived through, we have no evidence that Derumkin participated in any of them.  Moreover, his grants were apparently willingly and unconditional, one being to Thomas Watkins in return for arranging his travel by ship to Albany, almost certainly to negotiate relief from the constant threat of Mohawk attacks on the Indian communities in Maine which had begun in the 1640s.  He later made another grant for the same tract to John Giles, which deed, after his death, was confirmed by his son Cateramogus.  This evidence might suggest that Derumkin's sphere of activity lay exclusively within areas of English colonization, yet vital records for his children are found in parish records in Quebec and Acadia penned by a missionaries not known to have served in what is now Maine.  Moreover, this pattern seems to have been fairly common among other notable men in the Far Northeast throughout the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

It is unsurprising that males dominate the historical record consulted by HRIFNE-DA.  However there are instances where females achieved notability.  In the early seventeenth century, for example, Squaw Sachem, the widow of deceased Uber-Sachem Nanapeshamet, held title to and sold many large tracks to the north and east of Boston.  Another was the Penobscot Marie Ursule, known as Molly Molasses, who figured prominently in nineteenth century tribal affairs and in the community of Old Town in which it was embedded.  A third was the Abenaki Marie Agathe, known as Moliocket, who became a well-traveled and widely-respected herbal doctor throughout a broad region between Odanak, Quebec and Bethel, Maine, where her gravestone can be seen today.  And finally, Elizabeth Couc Montour, for whom Montour County, PA is named, us usually considered an Algonquin with French parentage, yet the Couc Montour name is later prominent in the records of the Abenaki village of Odanak.

3.  Identifying combatants in the Indian wars.

The so called Indian Wars actually comprise a series of six conflicts with very different origins, participants and outcomes.  King Philip's War (1675-1678) was an indigenous uprising that began in the borderlands between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  Of the several books that have been written about the war, few deal adequately with its spread to Maine, and those that do hardly address the identity of the Indian combatants there.  However, HRIFNE-DA reveals that the war might never have spread to Maine had not a few of Philip's allies acted as agents provocateur to incite some local warriors to attack the English but that many others tried         to maintain peaceful relations with the English or fled to Quebec or avoided the conflict in place.

        Four periods of conflict followed King Philip's war:

                King William's War (1688-99)

                Queen Anne's War (1702-14)

                Dummer's War (1721-6; no direct French involvment)

                King George's war (1744-8)

                French and Indian War (1754-63)

For those conflicts that involved English and French forces, details about Indian combatants are         dealt with somewhat dismissively.  However, data in HRIFNE-DA reveal or amplify published trends about Indian combatants.  The first is that, while Maine Indians actively supported the         French cause in King Willian's War, their support waned in later conflicts, being increasingly         supplanted by warriors who resided in Nouvelle France. The second is that Indians from the         praying towns of Massachusetts were often present in the militias sent to fight their native brethren on the eastern front.

These few examples, which arise from our own research interests, reveal some of the ways in which HRIFNE-DA can be applied to indigenous historical research in the Far Northeast.  Our hope is that they will inspire confidence among our colleagues to use it in exploring their own interests.