![]() ![]() He was ten years older and would, in 1869, predecease her by twenty years.Īt their wedding, a distant cousin and Rhode Island silversmith named William Hadwen was among the guests. Eliza, for her part, married Nathaniel Barney in May of 1820, just after she had turned eighteen. ![]() But for his sons, only the best, and the best meant expensive, imported brick.Īs it turned out, the girls did not fare too badly, either in choice of husband or eventual domicile. His daughters, being daughters, would have to depend on their husbands if they were ever to have such fine homes. He named one of his whaleships “Three Brothers” after his three sons, George, Matthew, and William, and in 1835, at the age of sixty-one, he oversaw the construction of what we now call the “Three Bricks”-one for George, one for Matthew, and one for William. Powerfully rich for his day, he was fond of acknowledging his male progeny in fairly flashy ways. His mind for detail and keeping books clearly were gifts passed on to his daughter. Early on, he demonstrated an acuity for business in his father’s counting house. Starbuck had no interest in going to sea but was brilliant at making money. They were married on January 26, 1797, when both were twenty-three years old.Įliza’s father would distinguish himself by becoming the island’s most successful businessman, a tycoon of the whaling era, making a fortune in whale oil. She was, for her day, a proper “buff,” enjoying research, an inclination that made her perfectly suited to become the island’s foremost genealogist.īorn April 9, 1802, Eliza Starbuck was the third of ten children born to Joseph and Sally Gardner Starbuck, three of whom “died young.” Joseph first met Sally Gardner while running an errand to her home when they were both fifteen. She was a self-taught botanist and entomologist, so respected in those fields that her obituary says she was “justly to be considered an authority for the rising generation.” And this interest would also creep into her genealogical record, as in the notation that an island man died “from a spider.” Her love of natural history, including all aspects of agriculture, was matched only by her love of history. In fact, Eliza Barney was a wife, a mother, an ardent Quaker with foresighted beliefs in women’s rights, temperance, and abolition. But who was she? Was she a lonely Quaker spinster with nothing else to occupy her days? Or the town “registrar”? Or someone who was fulfilling someone else’s mandate? Or was she a widow with intellectual vigor and time on her hands? Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney FellowshipĮliza Barney filled volume after volume with a neat hand and assiduous accuracy, documenting the family trees of islanders from the first Proprietors through their global offspring late into the 1800s. Private Events Make your Event Historic!. ![]()
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