Since this week has been a bit crazy for me, I don't have blog posts already written for today and Thursday like I usually do. This genealogy piece is mostly information I found on one website about this particular ancestor... who happens to also be one of Abraham Lincoln's ancestors. I find his story interesting and I hope you will too.
Here's the story on Obadiah Holmes...
from The New England Historical Society... (click here for the entire article)
Obadiah Holmes had a restless soul, a pugnacious spirit, a hot temper and a tendency to find fault.
He was baptized March 18, 1610, in Didsbury, England in the county of Lancashire.
As a boy, he rebelled against his religious parents.
“I minded nothing but folly, and vanity,” he wrote. Then his mother died, he blamed himself and changed his ways.
At 21, Obadiah Holmes married Katherine Hyde, and they had nine children. Together they ‘braved the dangers of the sea’ to come to Massachusetts in the Great Puritan Migration. He started a glassmaking business in Salem, but moved to Rehoboth in Plymouth Colony. There he led a small group of Baptists who opposed infant baptism.
A grand jury -- included William Bradford, John Alden and Miles Standish -- indicted Obadiah Holmes for heresy. He and his family left Plymouth for Newport, R.I., in 1650.
In Newport he quickly associated with Baptist ministers John Crandall and John Clarke, a prominent advocate of religious freedom.
President Lincoln is my 5th cousin, 4x removed according to Ancestry.com. Here's my lineage to Obadiah...
In the summer of 1651, the three men took a mission trip to an elderly Baptist man in the town of Lynn, just north of Boston. While they held a small religious service in the old man’s home, two constables burst in, arrested them and took them to jail in Boston.
A court found the three men guilty of a half-dozen crimes of heresy and fined John Clarke 20 pounds, John Crandall 5 pounds and Obadiah Holmes 30 pounds. Friends of Clarke and Crandall paid the fine. Holmes refused to let them.
On July 31, 1651, a magistrate sentenced Obadiah Holmes to 30 lashes, one for each pound he owed. Holmes proclaimed,
"I bless God I am counted worthy to suffer for the name of Jesus.”
Obadiah Holmes awaited his whipping for five weeks in a Boston jail. Roger Williams heard about his sentence, and he sent a blistering letter to Gov. Endecott for persecuting people for their religious beliefs.
On Sept. 5, 1651, a crowd gathered around the whipping post in Boston to watch the flogging. Obadiah Holmes asked to speak, but Magistrate Encrease Nowell refused. Holmes spoke anyway, saying he was about to shed his blood for what he believed. Nowell said it was no time for debate.
"I am to suffer for ... the Word of God and testimony of Jesus Christ," said Obadiah Holmes.
"No, it is for your error and going about to seduce the people," Nowell said.
The two men continued to debate as the executioner tore off Holmes' clothes.
The executioner tied him to the whipping post and lashed him 30 times with a three-corded whip.
When the whipping ended, a bleeding, panting Obadiah Holmes said, "You have struck me as with roses".
The whipping left his skin so raw and painful he couldn’t lie down, but rested on his knees and elbows for days.
"Those who have seen the scars on Mr. Holmes' back (which the old man was wont to call the marks of the Lord Jesus), have expressed a wonder that he should live," wrote Joseph Jenckes, a Rhode Island governor.
After Obadiah Holmes recovered enough to travel, he returned to Newport where family and friends welcomed him four miles outside the town. The next year he took over as pastor of the Newport Church, the second Baptist church in America. He held the position for 30 years until his death.
News spread fast and far about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. In the end it resulted in more, not less, religious freedom.
John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre. He went to England and wrote a book called Ill Newes From New England. It included a letter from Obadiah Holmes describing his whipping.If the Puritans intended to intimidate heretics by it, they failed. Two years after the whipping of Obadiah Holmes, Harvard President Henry Dunster wouldn't have his infant son baptized.
Richard Saltonstall, a prominent Puritan founder of Massachusetts then in London, read the book. He sent a letter to the Puritan pastors in the colony and berated them for 'tyranny and persecutions in New England.'
The dissenters of Rhode Island felt very much persecuted by Connecticut and Massachusetts. The two colonies wanted to divide Rhode Island and absorb it. Rhode Island needed a royal charter to survive.
Clarke spent a decade in England as an agent for the colony of Rhode Island. When King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Clarke lobbied him for a charter. Charles had little use for Puritans. They had, after all, beheaded his father.
Clarke drafted the Rhode Island Royal Charter and Charles approved it in July 1663. The charter granted unprecedented religious freedom in Rhode Island and remained in effect for 180 years.
Obadiah Holmes died Oct. 15, 1682, in Newport, R.I.
His great-great-great-great-great-grandson, Abraham Lincoln, was elected the 16th president of the United States.
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Obadiah Holmes was the father of
Lydia Holmes who was the mother of
John Andrew Bowne who was the father of
Catherine Bowne / Brown who was the mother of
Elizabeth Bray who was the mother of
James Luker, who was the father of
Eleanor Luker, who was the mother of
Sarah Donahay, who was the mother of
Clara Shafto, who was the mother of
Bruce Gant Sr, who was the father of
my father.
And here's Lincoln's lineage to Obadiah.
Obadiah Holmes (1610-1682) married Catherine Hyde (1608-1682)
Lydia Holmes (1637-after 1693) married Captain John Bowne (c.1630-1684)
Sarah Bowne (1669-after 1714) married Richard Salter, Esq. (1669-after 1728)
Hannah Salter (1692-c.1727) married Mordecai Lincoln (1686-1736)
John "Virginia John" Lincoln (1716-1788) married Rebecca Flowers (1720-1806)
Captain Abraham Lincoln (1744-1786) married Bathsheba Herring (c.1750-c.1836) Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851) married Nancy Hanks (1784-1818)
President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
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