With little formal education and a raging curiosity, John Farmer founded systematic genealogy in America from a small room above an apothecary shop in Concord, N.H.
Admirers called him the foremost genealogist and antiquarian of the 19th century.
His self-directed writing led to the creation of the New Hampshire Historical Society and the New England Historic Genealogical Society, now known as American Ancestors. A revision of Farmer’s great work “A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England,” published in 1829, to this day enjoys popularity as reference work.
Farmer typified a Eurocentric view of New England history, one that ignored marginalized communities and prompted a response. A Black historian from Boston founded the historiography of African Americans a decade or so after Farmer’s death.
John Farmer
He was born June 12, 1789, in Chelmsford, Mass., to Lydia Richardson and John Farmer, eponymously employed as a farmer and church deacon. HeEarly in life, the future genealogist traced his own ancestry to the days of Henry VII. His father was descended from Edward Farmer, an early New England settler. His mother was descended from Ezekiel Richardson, who sailed to Massachusetts with John Winthrop’s fleet in 1630.
Farmer had a mild and amiable disposition and a weak body. His biographer called him a boy who was always a man. At 16 he left home to work in a store in Amherst, N.H. The owner encouraged his love of books. He also formed a close friendship with the owner’s daughter, but his ill health prevented him from marrying her.
After five years as a shop clerk he started teaching, which he loved. He kept up his historical research and acquired some local fame. At 24 he was elected a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Improving the Self
Farmer helped found Amherst’s lyceum, the Franklin Society. The lyceum movement had just begun then. By the Civil War, thousands of such self-improvement societies would form and thrive, as citizens of the young republic tried to improve themselves. Speakers like Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe rode trains to speak at stops along the lyceum circuit.
In Amherst in 1816 Farmer published a pamphlet, “Historical Sketch of Billerica,” believed the first town history in New England. Billerica would have provided fertile ground for a budding genealogist, as it was then in the midst of an enormous baby boom. The average family in Billerica had 11.6 children. Just 90 families accounted for 1,043 children.
Farmer and his friend Jacob Moore later chronicled New England’s enormous colonial families in Collections, Historical and Miscellaneous and Monthly Literary Journal for the New Hampshire Historical Society.
The Savage family of Billerica
Concord, New Hampshire
At 32, he moved to Concord to work in an apothecary. He hoped to find in the state capital documents that would further his pursuit of his favorite historical investigations. Soon people spoke of him as the “accomplished scholar and faultless gentleman newly come to town.” Dartmouth College awarded him an honorary Master of Arts degree, then an appointment followed as justice of the peace for newly formed Merrimack County.
His biographer, John Le Bosquet, who as a boy knew him well, described Farmer at work in a room above the apothecary.
Attentive and urbane when interrupted by the call for root, ointment, or tincture, as soon as he found himself alone again his mind was in a labyrinth of genealogical names, dates, and events.
Farmer was so engaged in his studies that when General Lafayette on his grand tour of America passed beneath his window he may have gotten up to look out the window — then went back to work, wrote Le Bosquet.
Painting of Concord, N.H.,1858.
He was about 5-foot-9. extremely thin and pale, with a Grecian nose, high forehead, bushy eyebrows and piercing blue-gray eyes. He dressed plainly, neither fashionably nor slovenly, and he walked — never rode — with a stately air, always swinging a cane. People called him “doctor.”
Another Interest
Farmer also took quite an interest in young boys like Le Bosquet, and he mentored them. Wrote Le Bosquet,
A trait of character that marked Dr. Farmer’s whole life was his love for the society of young men, together with an earnest devotion to their welfare.
He taught them history, science, composition and how to formulate medicines. They often shared a bed at night.
When he died in 1838 at 49, his work was but half done, wrote Bosquet.
John Farmer’s Raison d’Etre
What compelled John Farmer to devote his life to genealogy? Certainly not money. He barely made ends meet and lived in boarding houses for most of his life.
The introduction to his Genealogical Register provides a clue. In it, he wrote:
An arrangement of names like the following, in this age of antiquarian research and inquiry, seemed to be wanted. We are all curious to know something respecting those who have preceded us in the stage of action; and there has begun a curiosity among many of the present generation to trace back their progenitors, in an uninterrupted series, to those who first landed on the bleak and inhospitable shores of New-England.
Farmer compared the settlement of New England with the Conquest of England. And he observed that Just as the English took pleasure in tracing their ancestry to the Normans, New Englanders could do the same with their forbears.
Farmer also did his major work at a time when the United States began to celebrate the achievements of the Founding Fathers. “The pursuit of ‘antiquarianism,’ which focused on local history, became increasingly a way to honor the achievements of early Americans,” notes American Ancestors.
Criticisms and Countermoves
Admirers of Farmers’ great work have said that, on examination, the Genealogical Register “contains but few names of men living in New England during its first two centuries that cannot be found.”
Not quite. Farmer focused on European settlers of New England. He ignored the disenfranchised – especially Natives and African Americans.
Not long after the publication of the Genealogical Register, an African American historian from Boston set out to prove that Black Americans had always belonged to the story of America’s founding. William Cooper Nell published the first histories of African Americans, “Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (1851)” and “The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855).”
William Cooper Nell
Nell in 1858 organized a memorial celebration of Crispus Attucks, the mixed-race sailor killed in the Boston Massacre. Farmer didn’t mention Attucks or his descendants in his Genealogical Register, though names of African Americans did appear in probate records and church records.
One of Crispus Attucks’ descendants, Dr. Mark Attucks, in 2016 came to New Bedford, Mass., from Washington, D.C., to promote Parting Ways, a little-known African-American settlement in Plymouth. Four formerly enslaved people fought in the Revolutionary War to gain their freedom. They were granted 94 acres if they cleared the land.
Ironically, the popular television series “Roots: The Saga of an American Family” is credited with spurring a modern interest in genealogy among all races.
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Images: Treat Rotunda at NEHGS, By NEHGS – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54939093. Concord, N.H., M. & N. Hanhart, and George Harvey. Concord, New Hampshire / from an original painting by G. Harvey, A.N.A. [London: Published by V. Bartholomew, 83 Charlotte St. Portland Place, London, London: Printed by M. & N. Hanhart] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2004666446/>.
