Norwalk

A spray of this Mistletoe, cut by a Hay, had certain charms ; and it was affirmed, Sarali Moore, born Feb. 12, 1661, bap. Farming- ton, etc. j Here, beyond doubt, we find the 1 laves maternity of all of Samuel's line. The Farinington deed regis- tration and the similarity of names — Ruth, Sarah and Isaac being More family names, and aferward bes- towed by Samuel Haves upon his own children — clearly point in such direction. That Nathaniel and Samuel Hayes were brothers is believed from the fact that the latter speaks of the former as " brother." Samuel Hayes also refers to Nathaniel Richards as "father Richards.'' It is possible that said Samuel married, for a second wife, a daughter of Nathaniel Richards by his first wife. It also seems that one of the Hayes' married the widow of James Pickett, <*t. of Danburv. 88 NOR W A L K . • when the root of the oak had perished, the grass should grow on the Hearth of Erroll, and a Raven sit on the Falcon's nest.' The oak is gone, and the estate lost to the family." The life-current that finds its source in the arteries of the Karl of Krroll's heroic " Hay" courses the life-channels of a large Norwalk Retts, Belden, Cannon, Seymour and St. John company, and like the vital sap of his Lordship's hard}" " aik," it is a fructifying tide. The family's genealogy is an interesting Norwalk study, aside from the legend. OF HAYES' DESCENT. After Richard Seymour, of Home-lot II, had been carried from the now Mrs. Theo- docia Bradley house site for burial, his widow, having married a well-known official at the colony's capital, thither removed, taking with her (see note 2, page 40) the three young Seymour children, and leaving behind the oldest child of the family. He, Thomas, had married a daughter of Matthew Marvin""- and had settled down in life. His son Matthew, named for the lad's grandfather Marvin, married one of the three daughters of Samuel Haves, Sarah, sister to Ruth, who married John Belden, Sr., and to Ann, who appears to have married a Greenwich Bush. Mrs. Matthew Seymour was evidently a considerate and conscientious woman. The Norwalk pastor, Rev. Thos. Hanford, had now (1694) died, and from the fact that the two Hayes sisters, Mrs. Seymour and Mrs. Belden, made a journey to Fairfield to have their tw o children baptized,' and one — Mrs. Belden — and the 'The brief life ston »( wit* ( R ml) [Eelden)of the little wnc's taken through the pietv of Christian par- ' ents tn Fairfield, and there, that ■lav. (Oct. 7, l6e-."l baptised, is not destitute of pathos. Little Ruth's mother (Mrs. John Belden, Sr.) was the daughter of Suimu-I Haves, whose first wife was, as has been ob- served, front Farniington. We have record of the birth place of this early New England mother, (Mrs. Samuel llayesl but we do not know the place of her burial. She probably rests somewhere in the ancient burial ground in the lower part of the town, While her grand-daughter fills the oldest inscribed grave in the bounds of Norwalk, beside which, as one stands and recalls the Fairfield pilgrimage, when its young occu- pant was dedicated to the Lord, and then was brought bark toiler N.mvalk hill slant home, nigh to the sparkling. Si raw berry Hill stream, there soon to blanch and fade, these well-known lines seem apposite : Hv mil Siln am', shady rill I [iiw fair the lily (-rows; Id m sweet the hreath beneath the hill, Li, .11,'h the child whose earlv Feet t he path- of peace have tr,.t|; \\ hose secret heart with influence -weei I- upward drawn to Ood. Iti cool Sl1,ihih\- -hady rill The lily nni-i decav: The ruse thai bloom- beneath the hill Must shortly fade away. The fitting counterpart of this young sleeper's East Norwalk memorial, reading: "Rent Bkldi-.n, IhmgtffT of Livut.T John an,/ RM IMtlr/t, ttgetf 14 rorri-s. Died Jttjrv V 2Jt tttlf'ii;*' is a s!ab in the peaceful Greenfield I [ill burial ground, on which is thus traced : "/« Afvmorv of \V i l l i a m Jordan, t;-/-o drill July 20. 17U4, ageif it, years 2 months a/if/ 11 days." Willie Jordan, "alike to friends and strangers dear," was a bright South Carolina lad who was under the parental care of the daughter (Mrs. Presi- dent Timothy Dwight) of a Norwalk mother who, in girlhood, ranged the meadows that constitute the Morgan Avenue of 1896; and the Norwalk application of " Cool Siloam " to little Ruth Belden's short his- tory reminds of the Norwalk association of another gem of Christian hymnolngv, beginning: I love Thy kiiiKd„m. Lord. The house of Thine abode; The Church our blest Redeemer -lived With His own prcci.Mi-. blood— which words flowed from the pen of a son-in-law (Dr. Timothy Dwight) of the same Norwalk Morgan Ave- nue maiden ( Esther Isaac) referred to in this para- graph. X O R \V A L K . ijg luisband of the other — Matthew Seymour — to make profession of their faith, is inferred that Mr. Hanford's place was at that time entirely vacant. To one of these good women, Mrs. Matthew Seymour, was born Thos. Seymour,3* (Thomas Seymour "\ son of Thomas it is supposed died young) who grew to become the progenitor of the Seymour's of "White Oak Shade," New Canaan. Thomas Seymour founded his pleasant home near the bend of the present Xew Canaan and Darien road, a short distance south of the 1896 Mead corner, at the intersection of the Norwalk and before-mentioned Xew Canaan highways. Capt. Thomas Seymour had a large family to his namesake son, of w hich he gave, in 1764, his home. Another son, Ezra married on Nov. 23, 1769, Abigail Waterbury of Stamford, and had Ezra"1-, born Dec. 16, who remained through life unmarried. He was a faithful attendant at St. Mark's Church, Xew Canaan, being found, late in life, regularly in his pew on the east side of the chancel, before the same was remodelled. His sister Rebecca, twelve years his junior, married Frederick son of Jonathan and Deborah Ayres.1 These had a son, Frederick who sought his bride in one of the old families of Westchester Count)-. She was the daughter of Asa and Sally Raymond of Salem. Like his father and his Ayres uncles, Frederick Seymour Ayres, ( Frederick 2j- 1 was alert and ambitious, and after a transient Xew Canaan business career, established himself in the near vicinity of one of the Nation's important and imposing establishments — the Watervlict U. S. Arsenal, in Albany Count)-, X. Y — where he prospered. He finally removed from the Empire State to the West, and there now resides. His daughter Carrie married Col. Frederick St. John Lockwood of Norwalk. Another son of Frederick""1" and Rebecca Seymour Ayres, is Chauncey Ayres, M. D., now of Stamford, w hile a daughter is the relict of the late Rev. John Purvis, who was an inti- mate of Sir Walter Scott, and a highly esteemed presbyter of the Protestant F2piscopal Church. 'These two New Canaan foreparents (Deborah nezer, . Vinos and Jared married three sisters, the was a Scofield) married Jnlv 21, 1771, and founded 1 daughters of Samuel Lockwood, whose farm took in the A vres home that stood some distance west of the I grand meadow acres then and now skirting west from " Piatt Farm," on Haynes' Ridge, now the elegant j the lower end of Canaan Ridge, as far as the Bedford Child estate, '• Wstgaunonta." Nine children were 1 road. Ebenexer was the father of Julia Ann, who brought up in this home. The sons became prom- married Judge Ma-or. Carter of Xorwalk, and the inent business nu n, while the daughters were actively h- grandfather, through his son Hezron, of Emma, who occupied in household duties during the secular week married William T. Comstock of Xorwalk, and whose and seen on Sunday in the sanctuary, to which, cross- niece, (Sally) daughter of her brother, a younger ing the Stamford perambulation path and adown , son of Ilezron Ayres, married February 7, 1895, Le I layin g Ridg.', they regularly rode. Fred'klst- mar- Grand, oldest ><m of (ieorge II. Raymond of N'or- ried Rebecca Seymour, as h is been noted, and lived 1 walk, whose grandfather, as per Hay nes Ridge article, in the central Xew Canaan abode, now supplanted by took especial delight in walking along those splendid the Rogers Clothing establishment. Minot and Jared 1 heights, particularly when the electric clouds were selected the sightly Clapboard Hill for residences. preparing, from behind the odoriferous Bedford .W Khenezer chose the sundown -lope of Brushy Ridge, petong (grape growing) Mountains, for their majestic and Amos the Ihim' site of the present Benedict & Co. : exhibition o'er William Haynes' broad plateau. The manufactory, Minot was thrice married, his last memory of said vicinity's thunder and lightning wife, Lueretia Raymond, having been aunt to Nor- sublimity in former times has not entirely faded walk's late first Selectman, Oscar W . Raymond. Ebe- lo-day. go X OR W ALK ASCENDANTS AM) DESC KN I) ANTS OF ALLEN HAVES BETTS. Hayes Line. Gen. I -Samfkl and Ruth Haves. '-'• ■ ■ IL— Isaac and Elizabeth (Sherwood) Haves. •• III.— Isaac""1 and MaRCARET Haves. As Isaac Hayes"1-, born March 23, 1 703, and his second cousin, Thomas Hayes'" lames1'-. Nathaniel"1) born Jan. 31, 1 7 14, were the two early Hayes known to have gone to the Oblong, and as Thomas did not marry until later,' it follows that Ruth Hayes, born Oct. 18, 1739, "daughter of Col. Hayes of Salem," was possibly and prob- ably a daughter of Isaac Hayes "'■ and the same who married Josiah Betts ( Matthew, Thomas 2d-, Thomas""-) born Feb. 5, 1735, of Norwalk. To this pair was born, on the very day (July 21, 1776) that armed men entered the Hayes' old Salem parish Church and stopped a service that was not for a generation resumed, ALLEN HAVES BETTS, a younger child of Josiah and Ruth (Hayes) Betts. Allen Hayes Betts married, first, Susanna, born Apr. 17, 1776, widow of Lewis Gruman, and daughter of Stephen Gregory, and had : Antoinette,2 born Apr. 19, 1806 ; Polly Delias born Dec. 24, 1813 ; Carmi, '"-born May 24, 1 808 ; Allen, born July 6, [817. Carmi, '"" oldest son of Allen Hayes Betts and wife Susanna, married Oct. 6, 1834. Julia, born July II, 1814, daughter of Jonathan and Sarah4 (Davenport) Bates of Darien, and had :