July 11, 2022
Editor’s note: William Partridge (1622-92) came from Dedham to Medfield about 1650 and was granted six acres of land on North Street between Pine and School Streets. His son William (1669-1750) lived on Green Street, near a street laid out in the 20th century called Partridge Road. Most of the Partridge descendants moved west in the first half of the 18th century, to Millis, Medway, and Franklin. About 372 years later, two Partridge descendants – Amy Hogg and her mother Bette – visited the Medfield Historical Society to do some genealogical research. Below is Amy’s report on their findings.
My mother and I live in Guelph, Ontario. We recently completed our fourth trip to New England exploring American roots that until 10 years ago we didn’t even know existed. We now know we have 48 surnames of ancestors who came to America during The Great Migration (1620 – 1640)! As in previously trips, we wanted to visit several cemeteries of some of these American ancestors we had identified in our research, find some answered to our research questions, and just enjoy a bit of a vacation after this long pandemic.
One of my mom’s many genealogy goals for this road trip was to track down the possibility of whether a woman by the name of Jane Hogg could possibly be her 9th great-grandmother. Hogg is a bit of an unusual name, and we thought it would be ironic if Mom was a Hogg before she ever married a Hogg! This Jane Hogg reportedly married a man with the last name Partridge in England, and we had found some leads on Ancestry that their children came to America in the 1600s and helped settle Medfield, MA. Could one of Jane Hogg’s son, William Partridge, possibly be our ancestor William Partridge of Hadley? Or could this William Partridge be related in some way to our Partridge ancestors who settled in Duxbury? Or, just as importantly, could we rule him out as being our William Partridge?
We believed the best place to start our research was going to be at the Medfield Historical Society, and we weren’t disappointed. After speaking with David Temple, we were able to make an appointment to visit and review the Society’s file for the Partridges of Medfield. I was pleasantly surprised to find there was so much information on this family available there!
What I learned from one of the filed documents on the Partridges was that “there were four principal and distinct families of this name who came to New England between the years 1630 and 1650.” These the author designates as the Medfield, Duxbury, Hadley, and Salisbury branches, from the towns where their founders settled and died. So far as can be learned, none of these bears any relationship to any other”.
We had our answer! Our Partridge ancestors are actually from two separate “Duxbury” and “Hadley” branches. Alas, we are not of the Medfield branch, and Jane Hogg is not our ancestor.
That is one of the important realities of genealogy. You have to be prepared to rule out possible ancestors when you work to establish your true ancestry. It’s all part of the journey! Research on the Internet, Ancestry.com, Wikitree, and DNA testing are all informative and can provide important pieces of the puzzle to be examined. But getting into the local historical societies, walking through the cemeteries, and talking with the people you meet along the way is even more interesting to my mother and me. We have been blessed to meet some wonderful people, and this trip was no exception!
Thank you to all the volunteers at the Medfield Historical Society, and especially to David, for all your hard work and efforts to preserve your local history! It means a lot to us who are on this journey of discovering our personal history.