A FAMILY REUNION OF SORTS 16

 ((First posted in 2011 on my West in New England blog))

 I haven't found much online about Worthy C Dunham and his family.  Like
the rest of the Dunhams in Abington he made his money in the shoe trade,
more specifically in manufacturing heels. When Benjamin Hobart published his
History of Abington in 1866 he included a list of manufacturers in the town taken
from the 1860 Us Census which showed Worthy Dunham had made $700 dollars
in sales. That doesn't seem like a lot of money by today's standards but that was
pretty respectable for those times , and Worthy probably did much better during
the Civil War when the area around Abington was the shoe manufacturing capital
of America.

Worthy's son Jotham Ellsworth Dunham apparently preferred to go by the name
J.Ellsworth Dunham and followed his father into the heel business.  He did so
well that in 1880  he built a fine house on Adams St in Abington where so many
of the wealthy families lived that the stretch of the street was known as Palace
Row. The house still stands and is on the National Register of historic homes.

I mentioned in the previous post in this series that there were Dunham children
listed in Hobart's book that weren't buried  with Worthy, including  J. Ellsworth.
Ellsorth is in fact buried nearby with his wife Lydia and their infant twin children :

The gravestone reads:

DUNHAM
J. Ellsworth Dunham
1842-1930
His Wife
Lydia Frances Gardner
1853-1928
Twin Babes 1876

There is another Dunham buried nearby and I'll discuss that in the next
post in this series.

A FAMILY REUNION OF SORTS15

 

Benjamin Hobart's  History of the town of Abington, Plymouth County,
Massachusetts, from its first settlement  has become my first place to
look for information about my Abington cousins. On page 369 I found the
following:

IV. Worthy C Dunham, born in Abington June 17, 1815; was married to
Irene Shaw of Weymouth, December 24, 1837. Their children were—

V. Rensellaer, born September 16, 1838; died September 17, 1839.

V. Jotham Ellsworth, born May 3, 1842.

V. Sumner Ellis, born September 3,1847; died September 25, 1848.

V. Irene Shaw, born October 23, 1851.

V. Sarah Williams, born July 22, 1855.

V. Abbie Weston, born August 30, 1858; died August 15, 1859.

Irene Shaw, wife of Worthy C. Dunham, died January 4,

1860, aged 42 years, 11 months, 9 days; he next married Marilla Pratt, 
October 4, 1860.

Now I knew there were more children who were not listed on the monument.
Could they have been buried there and the names not inscribed on the blank
western side of the marker? It was far more likely they had survived to
adulthood and were buried elsewhere. But what about the inscription
for Frank, Grace and  Robert on the south side? Grandchildren perhaps?

First though, I wanted to check on Worthy's parents, I looked on the previous
page, 368:

"III. Mr. Ezra Duuham was born in Plymouth, May 10, 1785; married, first, 

Susanna Ford, of Abington, January 30, 1806. They had one son, Henry,

born October 13, 1806; second, married Polly Cary, daughter of Howard 

Cary, Esq., of North Bridgewater. They had seven sons and three daughters,

viz., Susan, Howard Cary, Worthy Columbus, Charles Atwood, Cornelius 

Thomas, Ezra Rider, Angeline Huldah, Elbridge Cary, Francis William, 

and Lydia Howard." 

So, Worthy's middle name was Columbus and he was the half brother of 

General Henry Dunham and full brother to Cornelius T, Dunham, both of

whose graves I had previously discovered in Mt. Vernon Cemetery.

Now what else could I find out about him and his family?