Noyes Pattee Whittemore

This relative from the 1800s married Augusta Stark, a grandniece of General John Stark, famous in his lifetime for the Battle of Bennington in the Revolutionary War ("Tonight our flag flies over yonder hill, or Molly Stark sleeps a widow"), but now chiefly remembered for Live Free of Die. Death is not the worst of evils. Johnny Stark was prosperous, and large sums went to many descendants. Noyes married Augusta and proceeded to gamble away her fortune, which must have take astounding bad luck and determination in Litchfield, NH in the 1800s. The town didn't get over 500 citizens until the 1950s. There are still a few people with the Pattee surname in the Scots-Irish sections along the rivers in NH, but it was more common then.  Even though I have his mother's and father's lines back a few generations each, I can't see that Pattee was brought in to commemorate any of them. The Whittemores go back through Haverhill to Salem, MA, and my batch lived largely along the Merrimack in Londonderry and Litchfield.

At least, that's the way the story came to us. "One of Harriet's brothers married a Stark girl and he gambled his way through her fortune." I can't find record of it now, not even a suggestion. It doesn't ring as coming from my childhood - even scandals much nearer to the living were hush-hush in those days (such as my grandfather's father abandoning the family when he was four, changing his name and moving to Dayton, Washington around 1900). It must stem from my mother's comments in the 1980s, as she had a remarkable memory for family information. NP Whittemore was the brother of Harriet Whittemore, my great-great grandmother who was a schoolteacher in Londonderry. There is a room dedicated to her at the Londonderry Historical Society, which two of my cousins have taken considerable interest in and provided lots of personal items for - clothes, books, dolls, schoolteaching supplies, a large painted portrait. 

Noyes must have been thorough, as he ended up at the Poor Farm in Goffstown. Before the poor farm, the town would pay the low bidder to watch after each of the impoverished elderly on a yearly basis, but the farm came in in the 1840s. He was born in 1830 and died in 1904.  I go by the Hillsborough County Cemetery, Grasmere, NH (part of Goffstown) on my rail trail walks, but the stones are only numbered, not named. About 600 of the 710 stones are linked to names, but Noyes isn't one of them. My closest cousin is coming over tomorrow and I'm going to show him where it is. 

I talk to dead ancestors, but he's not going to be one of them.