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William was baptised on 4 Sep 1658 in Church Stoke, Montgomeryshire, Wales [1]
Marriage:
Children's Baptisms:
Possible 1st marriage per Pearson:
The following information about William's life was posted to his Geni page:[7]
From Glenn Tomlinson There is a lot of unverified information circulating on the web regarding the ancestry and origins of William Bowen of Schenectady. I'd like to share what I've discovered. But first I'd like to go on record as saying (as nicely as possible) there are two popular oft-repeated theories that can easily be refuted by verifiable facts i.e. he is a descendant of Griffith Bowen or that he descends from the English Bonneys, his surname later changed to Bowen.
With that out of the way here's some of what we can determine with certainty from records in America: - married in Albany NY 22 Jan 1690 to Seitje Joncker - married in Schenectady NY 13 Sep 1702 to Rachel Joncker of whom he had issue: William, Maria, Sarah (baptisms for these first three can all be found in the records of the Reformed Dutch Church of Schenectady); his remaining children - Reyer, Susanna, John and Cornelius, all appear to have been born in NY and appear in later church records, primarily in the Mohawk Valley - listing 9 Jun 1713: Wm. Bown (sic) is listed as an inhabitant and freeholder of the town of Schenectady (Pearson, History of the Schenectady Patent, p. 34): thereafter he likely moved with his family west to Tryon, later Montgomery, County, New York (the 'Hansen Patent' of 1713 granted acreage in the vicinity of Tribes Hill, Montgomery County, New York, where many of his descendants lived)
So the earliest verifiable record found to date is 1690 in Albany. Where was he before that? I have uncovered two separate sources which indicate he participated in the Glorious Revolution of 1689 which put William and Mary on the throne of England. One source will suffice here, taken from the "The Neligh News" January 2, 1958: "Funeral services were held December 21 at the Oakdale Church of Christ for Mrs Ida SNIDER, 98, Oakdale's oldest resident, who died at the Perishing Hospital in Grand Island. One of her ancestors was Colonel NELSON (sic) BOWEN who received from the English CROWN a grant of land along the Hudson for distinguished service under Prince William of Orange, about the end of the seventeenth century..."
Having established William was in the Netherlands up until 1689, I looked for records of him there. On 31 Dec 1686 I found the marriage record of Wiljam Boun to Dorothea Isveldt in Heusen, Noord Brabant. The interesting thing about this record is that it records Bowen as a soldier in Captain Lloyds' Company, in what would be later known as the British 5th Regiment of Foot. This company, in turn, participated in the Glorious Revolution (see Walter Wood, The Northumberland Fusiliers, 1901). I cannot say with absolute certainty that this is our William but the circumstantial evidence is very strong (note: I assume Dorothea died sometime before 1690 - there are no recorded children of the two and dutch records are very good).
From this point I looked for a recruitment date and discovered that the regiment was in England during the summer of 1685. From their I assumed he must have been at least 18 years of age and so I began looking for birth records (over a twenty year spread ending in 1668) primarily in Wales (the Bowen name is Welsh after all), all the while keeping in mind the names of William's children to see if they might recur in his parents' names. I found only one hit! A William Bowen christened 4 Sep 1658 in Churchstoke, Montgomeryshire, Wales the son of... Cornelius Bowen and Sarah Bromley. In addition, no marriages or deaths for this William appear in the parish records of Churchstoke. Again, we can't be sure that this is our William. But the circumstantial evidence is very strong that it is.
Some notes on the Bowen family in Tribes Hill from an unsourced newspaper article from 1857: [8]
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Categories: Church Stoke, Montgomeryshire