Family Search Place name

Question

Kitty just added a source for the profile (THANKS!) ... I look at the page and it has birth/death place name: Agawam, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts.  I'd never seen 'Agawam' before, so, I venture off to WikiPedia and it's way West of Essex and doesn't seem to have much to do with Ipswich.  Am I missing something or is this just a Family Search biff?

As an aside, as I was looking at Agawam on Wikipedia, I noted that it has the lowest zip code in the US (government entities not included) 01001 ... I just love trivia!

Answer 1

Agawam, home of Six Flags amusement park, formerly known as Riverside Park.

Obviously someone didn't check what they sent to family search. I've added a link to the birth/baptism record on the profile. It's in Ipswich.

Comments

Maybe I only dreamed this, but I have a vague recollection that I ran across the name Agawam on a record that was clearly eastern Massachusetts, was surprised because I know where Agawam is now, but then read something that revealed that some place in eastern Massachusetts had formerly been named Agawam.

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It's a Native American word. There were Agawam indians, who according to wikipedia lived in what is now Essex county and also out near Springfield, near the current Agawam is. So maybe there was a place called Agawam in Essex, also.

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I wasn't dreaming. Agawam was the English interpretation of the Native American name for the area that became Ipswich, and the name was used by the Puritans for a little while:

• http://www.historicipswich.org/
• http://www.historicipswich.org/ipswich-history-1634-1700/
• https://storiesfromipswich.org/2014/06/07/who-were-the-agawam-indians-really/
• http://robinlull.com/garylull/Ipswich,_MA_Timeline_1601-1622.html
• https://books.google.com/books?id=jFVgAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA12

I suppose the name may have been persisted for a while as the name for a part of the town, but I've not seen evidence for that.

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Kudos to you all!!  And, I'm being a bit lazy here and not reading all of the stuff in all of the links ... was Ipswich ever referred to as Agawam, Ipswich or is that poetic license by Family Search?

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I believe we've determined that yes Ipswich was at one time called Agawam, so the person did know what they were doing.