A Brief History

The Edminsters are an American family originating in 17th century Scotland. While the name is not known to have existed in Scotland in its current form, some genealogists of Clan Edmonstone theorize without evidence that it is a corruption of that name. In the 19th century most members of the family standardized the spelling to "Edminster," but other variations of the surname still exist, including "Edmister," "Edmester," and "Edminister." All evidence suggests these are the same family, descended from a common 17th century ancestor.

The first Edminster was a young Scottish Royalist Soldier who fought for King Charles II in the Anglo-Scottish War of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, commonly referred to as the Civil Wars. In the decade preceding the Anglo-Scottish War of 1650-52, the religious turmoil and power struggles of the Enlightenment era led to a deadly series of revolts and civil wars that culminated in the English Parliament executing King Charles in 1649, after which the Parliament of Scotland eventually declared his son Charles II king, while England entered a period known as the Interregnum under various forms of republican government largely controlled by Oliver Cromwell. Having subdued royalists in England and conducted the conquest of Catholic Ireland, Cromwell turned his attention to the growing royalist problem in the North and mounted a successful invasion of Scotland at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650. Sensing an opportunity while Cromwell was occupied in the North, the young King Charles II took an army of Scottish Presbyterians and Covenanters south into England in an attempt to beat the New Model Army in a race to London to capture the throne, but the English had predicted this maneuver, and the 16,000 exhausted and ill-equipped Scottish troops encountered 28,000 soldiers of the New Model Army in a brutal urban fight at the city of Worcester. This conflict, known as the Battle of Worcester (1651), was the final battle of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and resulted in a decisive victory for the New Model Army, clearing the way for Cromwell and the Parliamentarians to rule Great Britain and Ireland as a republic. Of the 16,000 Scottish troops at Worcester, 10,000 were captured. King Charles II narrowly escaped by disguising himself as a servant boy and making a famous flight to exile in Europe, where he lived until his Restoration in 1660.

We first find evidence of John D. Edminster (recorded as Edminsteire), ancestor of all living Edminsters, in the aftermath of this important battle. He and the 10,000 other Scottish POWs captured at Worcester were marched to Tothill Fields in London to wait while Parliament debated what to do with them. According to research conducted by genealogist Diane Rapaport referenced on the website for the Scottish Prisoners of War Society (SPOWS), which exists to preserve the history of indentured Scottish POWs in New England:

“Few of the Scots who survived Worcester ever returned home. Thousands of prisoners were “driven like cattle” to London. As one witness described the convoy, “all of them [were] stript, many of them cutt, some without stockings or shoes and scarce so much left upon them as to cover their nakedness, eating peas and handfuls of straw in their hands which they had pulled upon the fields as they passed.” At temporary prison camps in London and other cities, many prisoners died of starvation, disease and infection, while the Council of State debated what to do with the defeated multitudes.

Of the 10,000 prisoners taken in the Battle of Worcester, it is said that 1,000 prisoners were put to work draining the fens in East Anglia; 1500 shipped out to the gold mines of Guinea; others were sent to labor in the Barbadoes and Virginia; and in November [1651], 272 Scots were herded aboard the John and Sara, bound for New England.”

Arrival in New England

In November 1651, John D. Edminsteire was ordered onto the ketch John & Sara under Captain Thomas Kemble, father of Sarah Kemble Knight, and departed for Boston with 272 other Scottish POWs. Kemble was working as an agent for three wealthy London merchants who had acquired the rights to the indentures: Robert Rich, John Becx, and William Greene. Most of the POWs would serve out the remainders of their indentures around New England. The complete manifest of the John & Sara is kept at the Scottish Prisoners of War Society website, along with individual profile pages for POWs from Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651). After delivering the POWs to Boston, Captain Kemble and the John & Sara sailed to Barbados to deliver the proceeds from the sale of the indentures to Charles Rich, the brother of Robert Rich.

Upon arriving, John was indentured to Valentine Hill (wikitree profile), owner of the mill at the Oyster River Plantation in Durham, New Hampshire, where he and six other Scots were engaged in timbering, operating the saw mill at Durham Falls, and digging a canal to connect the Mill Pond with the Lamprey River at "The Moat." According to the Durham Historical Society website, the seven Scots indentured at Oyster River received land grants for their work. Originally, the punishment was intended to entail a lifetime of enslavement in America. "The prisoners were shipped by the freighters John Becx, Robert Rich, and William Greene of London by authority of an … ordinance of Parliament dat 20th of October 1651 ... as slaves ... as a sort of banishment for their rebellion." The colonists, however, chose to limit the terms of their enslavement to 6-8 years, "as we do our owne," according to a letter from the Reverend John Cotton to Lord General Cromwell.

It is uncertain when he married, but it appears that John and his first wife, Hannah (1642 - 1679), whose parents are unknown, were wed in New Hampshire before removing to Massachusetts in 1664, as their first daughter Hannah was born in 1662, and there are records of them in New Hampshire until at least 1664. In any case, by 1664 they had made a home in Charlestown, across the river from Boston, where John would become a shipwright and they would raise at least five children:

Hannah Edminster b. 1662

James Edminster 1664 - 1728

John Edminster 1665 - 1720

Prudence Edminster b. 1667

Mary Edminster b. 1670

Frank Custer Edminster Jr. cites numerous records in Edminster Family in America for John's life in Charlestown. It appears that he and Hannah purchased property there in 1665 after relocating from the Oyster River Plantation, as John is listed on a property tax roll at Charlestown in 1688 under Governor Andros. According to the tax record, John bought a garden property from John Drinker (born 1627, father of John Drinker Jr.) and built a home on it. The property was reportedly near the fort on Town Hill that Charlestown planner Thomas Graves built in 1629. In 1677-78, John was listed in a group of citizens inspected by tithingman John Fosdick. In 1713, the year before he died, John mortgaged his property on Town Hill. His son James sold the property along with the mortgage in 1719.

After his first wife Hannah died, John married 17 Jun 1679 Sarah (Bowtell) Thompson, widow of Scottish Battle of Dunbar POW George Thompson (founding member of the Scots Charitable Society), who had been indentured at the Saugus Iron Works—"birthplace of the American iron and steel industry"—owned by John Winthrop the Younger and investors including the major English iron merchant and manufacturer John Becx, mentioned above as one of the owners of the rights to the indentured Scots (while most of the indentures were sold off to other owners, a few dozen Scots were kept indentured at the Iron Works). Sarah Bowtell was a daughter of James Boutwell and Alice Ling, farmers from Cambridgeshire who were supposedly affected by enclosure. She was reportedly born in Cambridgeshire in 1635 before the family moved to Massachusetts Bay Colony, where they lived in Salem and Reading near the town of Lynn where the Iron Works were located.

Life Among Puritans

While evidence suggests that John D. Edminster became a shipwright in Charlestown, there are no known records indicating that he or his first wife were fully admitted to the church there, as that would have been a privilege reserved for the Puritan elite. John's Anglo second wife Sarah Boutwell Thompson is known to have been admitted to the First Church of Charlestown on 24 Apr 1681 "by dismission from Reading Church," according to church records. Reading was the home of Sarah's parents, James and Alice Boutwell. In the same church record book John and Hannah's daughter Prudence is listed as being baptized on 27 Dec 1686, so it appears that the family was at least somewhat active in the religious community.

That they were active at all in religious affairs of the time would be notable, because as Scottish Presbyterians they were certainly cultural outsiders. Many reports from the time complain of dealing with the unruly indentured Scots and other outsiders working the mills, mines, and iron works, who had no interest in following the strict religious codes of the Puritan government. Many ironworkers "were regularly brought before the court for profanity, Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, and brawling," while domestic violence and murder were also reported. Governor Winthrop lobbied for the Iron Company to provide religious instruction to no avail, as the skilled labor was too in-demand to start asking even more of the laborers. Exacerbating frictions between the Puritan community and the ironworkers was the fact that the short labor supply meant the workers were often able to negotiate themselves desirable salaries which they used to buy fancy dress and other material displays of status. The Puritan elite were not keen on any sort of upward mobility among the lower classes, so in 1651 the courts reiterated earlier 1630s Sumptuary Laws banning uppity displays of wealth from persons of "mean condition":

"...we cannot but account it our duty to commend unto all sorts of persons the sober and moderate use of those blessings which, beyond expectation, the Lord has been pleased to afford unto us in this wilderness. And also to declare our utter detestation and dislike that men and women of mean condition should take upon them the garb of gentlemen by wearing gold or silver lace, or buttons, or points at their knees, or to walk in great boots; or women of the same ranke to wear silk or tiffany hoods, or scarves which, though allowable to persons of greater estates or more liberal education, we cannot but judge it intolerable. . . .

"It is therefore ordered by this Court, and authority thereof, that no person within the jurisdiction, nor any of their relations depending upon them, whose visible estates, real and personal, shall not exceed the true and indifferent value of £200, shall wear any gold or silver lace, or gold and silver buttons, or any bone lace above 2s. per yard, or silk hoods, or scarves, upon the penalty of 10s.  for every such offense and every such delinquent to be presented to the grand jury." (This excerpt from the 1651 Sumptuary declarations can be found in Chapter 2 of the comprehensive report on Roland W. Robbins' excavations of the Saugus Iron Works site from 1948-1953. I have also used sources from Chapter 10, "The Artifacts" for this section. Full text here: Saugus Iron Works, The Roland W. Robbins Excavations, 1948-1953).

Although John seems to have led an orderly and lawful life, his daughter Mary is a different story, as she was arrested for burglary in 1689. While the circumstances of her crime are not clear, it does indicate a life on the margins of Puritan society common to many Scots and other outsiders present in the colonies at the time.

The Second Generation

John and Hannah Edminster had five known children: three daughters and two sons. While no records exist to verify their birth locations, we can surmise the places they were born based on where their parents were living. 

The first daughter, Hannah, was born 1 Feb 1662, probably at the Oyster River Plantation land grant, before the family moved to Charlestown in 1664. We know they moved in 1664 because there are records of them in both Durham and Charlestown that year. The final four children are presumed to have been born at Charlestown: James, born 1664; John, born 12 Mar 1665/6; Prudence, born 15 Jan 1667/8; and Mary, born 13 Nov 1670.

Little is known about Hannah, John, or Mary besides Mary's conviction for robbery in 1689. None of them are known to have married. When John D. Edminster died 20 Jul 1714, his son James inherited his father's Charlestown property as an "only son," so it is likely that John Jr. either died young or did not have children and had left the area. Prudence is found in two records: on the date of her 1687 baptism at the First Church of Charlestown, and the date of her 1689 marriage to Joseph Pike, but nothing else is known of this marriage and it has been assumed that it produced no issue.

This leaves James as the only known member of the second generation to have left progeny, and as such all living Edminsters are descended through him. He, like his siblings, also disappears from the Boston/Charlestown area records shortly after reaching adulthood. For the most part, we can only speculate why this might be, but judging by the legal exclusion and prejudices experienced by Scots in colonial Puritan society, it is not surprising that the siblings wouldn't have fit the mold of the crowded Anglo coastal settlements. Whatever may have motivated James to leave the city, eventually it was marriage that kept him in the wilderness for good. In 1719 James sold his father's Charlestown house on Town Hill to a "Nicholas Moorey of F." and severed ties to his hometown completely.

On 19 Apr 1689, James had married Anne Makepeace in her hometown of Freetown, located near Taunton on the Assonet River about 45 miles south of Boston, where her father William Makepeace had settled around 1661. As William was a major land owner in the area, it seems that they chose to stay closer to her father's estates rather than returning to Boston and Charlestown.

William's father, the mercer Thomas Makepeace (1595-1667), came to New England in 1635, the year before William was born, and lived at Dorchester and Boston, where he had become a founding member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. He was apparently "of a liberal view regarding religion" and was involved in a squabble in 1638 in which his detractors "were weary of him unless he reformed" (Edminster Family, pp. 4). Despite this, he was a major land owner in the Massachusetts Bay area, owning 200 acres in Dorchester among other properties (including the ancestral properties at Burton Dassett, Warwickshire inherited by his eldest son, who stayed in England). Thomas Makepeace died in Boston in 1667.

The union of James Edminster and Anne Makepeace in Freetown in 1689 meant that the Freetown and Assonet areas would become a major center for the Edminster family for the next 100 years, when many members would begin to spread out to other areas of New England after the Revolutionary War. 

The next installment in this series will focus on the history of the Makepeace family (former owners of Sulgrave Manor) and the Edminster-Makepeace union at Freetown from which all modern Edminsters are descended.