Andrew Ward (1727 - 1799)

Born 19 Nov 1727 in Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut

Ancestors

Husband of Diana (Hubbard) Ward — married 7 Sep 1750 in Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut

Descendants

Died 10 Jan 1799 at age 71 in Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut, United States

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Biography

Brigadier General Andrew Ward served with Colonel Andrew Ward's Regiment (1776), Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Andrew Ward is an NSSAR Patriot Ancestor.
NSSAR Ancestor #: P-313117
Rank: Brigadier General

General Andrew WARD, son of Andrew Ward and Elizabeth Fowler, was born 19 Nov 1727 in Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut. He died 10 Jan 1799 in Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut. Andrew married Diana HUBBARD on 7 Sep 1750 in Guilford, New Haven, Connecticut.

They had the following children:

1. Roxana WARD was born 7 Jan 1751 and died 30 Oct 1840; mar. Eli Foote
2. Diana WARD was born 24 Sep 1752; died 24 April 1784; mar. Abraham Chittenden
3. Deborah WARD was born 1756; died 1 January 1781; unmar.
4. Elizabeth WARD was born 23 Jan 1760; died 6 Sep 1760
5. Mary WARD was born 5 Oct 1764; died 22 Feb 1783; unmar.
6. Andrew WARD was born 23 Mar 1767; died 30 Aug 1769^[1]

Andrew Ward served under David Wooster in the 1st Connecticut Regiment (1775),^[2] and then later commanded his own regiment (1776).

Mrs. Elizabeth (Foote) Jenkins, great-great-granddaughter of Andrew Ward, 4th, wrote about her ancestor in an unpublished ms. owned by the family. She recounts how one of his earliest military adventures was receiving a commission, dated May 1, 1775, as "Lieutenant Colonel...under the service of George the Third" at the taking of St. John's in October 1775. Ironically the following year he was appointed as Colonel for a regiment appointed in 1776, which served in New York and Brooklyn. His men were in battle at White Plains in Oct. 1776, Trenton in Dec. 1776, and Princeton in Jan. 1777. George Washington asked him to "take charge of the rear guard; to keep up the camp fires and the appearance of the army being still present." He was later commended for his "well managed retreat [as] he did not lose a man." After his participation in more battles, he was at the taking of Saratoga.

Jenkins tells us that after the war he showed himself to be "an intelligent farmer...he brought the first apple trees to Nut Plains...[and] the first potatoes to Guilford." The story is told that "when he came back from the General Assembly at Hartford, to which he was elected from 1771 to the year of his death, he brought his saddle bags filled with nails on one side and with books on the other. He went about and drove in nails wherever it was necessary, and then sat down and read his books."

When his son-in-law Eli Foote died of yellow fever in North Carolina, he took in his daughter Roxana and her ten children at his farm in Nut Plains a few miles from the town center of Guilford. When two of Roxana's sons, Andrew Ward Foote and William Henry Foote died in the fall of 1994, from "fatigue and illness caused by acting as pall-bearers for a distance of two miles [down to the Village Green]...the loss of these two boys of sixteen and fourteen broke the General's hearts...[and] he laid out a private burial plot on his own farm, an eighth of a mile from his house, on a beautiful knoll with oak trees, above the little river."^[3]

Sources

1. ↑ Families of Early Guilford, Connecticut, Vol. II, Ward family, p. 1191.
2. ↑ AmericanWars.org, "Connecticut Continental Troops, First Regiment - General Wooster, 1775"
3. ↑ "Colonel Andrew Ward. General Andrew Ward," by Mrs. Elizabeth (Foote) Jenkins, unpublished ms. owned by descendants of Eli and Roxana Foote, viewed online at https://generalandrewwardcemeteryassoc.wordpress.com/historical-context/ See this website for more information about the cemetery, this family and their descendants.

• Sons of the American Revolution Patriot #P-313117
• Daughters of the American Revolution, DAR Genealogical Research Databases, database online, (http://www.dar.org/ : accessed September 8, 2015), "Record of Andrew Ward", Ancestor # A120427.
• Find A Grave: Memorial #17148565

See also:

• “From George Washington to Colonel Andrew Ward, 14 March 1777,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-08-02-0613. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary War Series, vol. 8, 6 January 1777 – 27 March 1777, ed. Frank E. Grizzard, Jr. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998, p. 575.]