William Carnahan (1725 - 1786)

Born 1725 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts

Ancestors

Husband of Mary (Clark) Carnahan — married 26 Jul 1759 in Blandford, Hampden, Massachusetts

Descendants

Died 17 Jun 1786 at about age 61 in Blandford, Blandford, Hampshire, Massachusetts, United States

Problems/Questions Profile managers: Carl Wentworth [send private message], John Putnam [send private message], and Lydia Vierson [send private message]

Biography

William Carnahan was a son of immigrants Samuel Carnahan (1698-1786) and Lydia Davis (1700-1741), both born in Ireland (geneanet.org). Cannon (1932) suggests that William was the eldest of their five children, possibly born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, a location adopted by geneanet.org. William was born in about 1725, suggests Cannon (1932), based on the birth in that year of his first wife Miriam Thompson, a date also adopted by geneanet.org. They must have settled in Blandford, Massachusetts, first settled by Scots-Irish in 1735, because that was where their son William Thompson was born September 1, 1758, and where Miriam died three weeks later, probably as a result of that birth. William then married Mary Clark (1735-1819) in Blandford on July 26, 1759. They had ten children over the next 20 years (Mehitabel (Blair), Sarah (Ferguson), Miriam (Shields), David, Mary (Davidson), Martin, Elizabeth (Gibbs), Robert, Lewis, and Hannah (Knox).

William was a town selectman and a frequent moderator of town meetings, as well as being active in the church. He fought in the French and Indian War and was later chosen to represent Blandford at the provincial congress in Concord of April, 1775. During the Revolutionary War he served as Captain in the Continental Army. In Blandford he dealt in property and held a retailer’s license that permitted him to sell liquor, a lucrative business at the time. In 1754 he bought land about a mile north of town and lived there for the rest of his life. In 1932 that property was still called the William Cannon farm. The surname Cannon rather than Carnahan follows from the fact, as explained by Cannon (1932), that “the name was always pronounced CANNON, no matter how spelled”. Later generations used Cannon.

It is recorded in the June 26, 1786 edition of the American Mercury of Hartford, Conn., that Capt. William Cannon hung himself in the barn on June 17, 1786 (age about 61). Cannon (1932) explains that a persistent tradition in Blandford held that William, despite having served in the Continental Army, had never completely abandoned his Royalist views, and in the end succumbed to the derision of his old friends. Mary lived another 33 years according to Geneanet’s record, and several unsourced profiles on ancestry.com place her death on March 25, 1819 in Blandford.

(Carl M. Wentworth, 2023)

Sources

• Cannon, A.B., 1932, The descendants of Samuel (Carnahan) Cannon of Ulster, Ireland and Blandford, Massachusetts: unpub. typescript, 181 p. (from Onondaga County Public Library (NY) via familysearch.org)

• Findagrave: Lydia Davis ID 91774715, Samuel Carnahan ID 91774691, Miriam (Carnaham) ID 139302421

• geneanet.org: Lydia Davis - https://gw.geneanet.org/jeff81ou?n=davis&oc=&p=lydia, Miriam Thompson - https://gw.geneanet.org/acates?n=thompson&oc=&p=miriam

• Hale Collection of Cemetery Inscriptions and Newspaper Notices, 1629-1934 (William’s suicide)

• Massachusetts, U.S., Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988, Blandford, Miscellaneous Records: for birth of William Thompson Carnahan, son of William Carnahan and Mary/Miriam his wife. (The handscript of the record is overwritten, and seems to be Mary modified to Mariam, thus crowding the subsequent “his wife”. The dates require that Miriam was William’s birth mother.)

• Wikipedia (town of Blandford, MA)

Title

Title: Captain

Note

Ten grown children A number of birth records are available on FamilySearch.org in Blandford, Hampshire, Massachusetts.

William was born in 1725. He passed away in 1786.

Sources

Entered by Lydia Vierson, Wednesday, June 18, 2014.

• WikiTree profile Cannon-459 created through the import of Putnam2-1_2010-01-02_2011-02-16_2011-10-11.ged on Oct 12, 2011 by John Putnam.

• geneanet.org (birth)
• Connecticut, U.S., Hale Collection of Cemetery Inscriptions and Newspaper Notices, 1629-1934 (death)