William McCarty (1746 - bef. 1782)

Born 7 Jan 1746 in Bristol, Bristol County, Province of Massachusetts Bay

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Biography

William was born in 1746 at Bristol, Rhode Island, the son of Dennis and Margaret (Woods) McCarty.^[1]

He married Clarissa Jacob on 7 November 1770 at Bristol.^[2] They had seemingly multiple children, but only one was recorded:

• Margaret b. 29 January 1772

He died probably by 1782, when Clarissa appears as head-of-household in a census at Bristol. He was perhaps dead already by 1777, in which year he seemingly did not appear in a military census conducted to count all military-aged men in Rhode Island.

Research Notes

On 6 June 1791, Margaret McCarty of Dighton certified that she wished to relinquish her rights of administration on the estates of her grandmother Margaret McCarty and of Ann McCarty, both of Bristol deceased, and requested that Isaac Eslick of Bristol be appointed administrator of their estates in her stead.

Deacon Calvin Jacobs lived in Dighton during the 1790 and 1800 censuses and shows unaccounted females in the household. He named a daughter Clarissa.

Virginia Baker collected information on William and his father. In 1901, she wrote in The Recorder: Bulleting of the American-Irish Historical Society ]https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Recorder/Pck8AAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=RA4-PA7&printsec=frontcover an article about a different Dennis MacCarty] than the father of William who lived around the same time and place. Her first sentence said, "Since I forwarded to The Recorder the items relating to Dennis and William Mackarty... It is not known what became of this information. In The MacCarthys in Early American History, O'Brien cites a reprinting of this article and states that Virginia Baker was a descendant of William's father. But an examination of her tree back a century before her birth did not indicate a connection to McCartys.

William appears as head of a household in Bristol in the 1774 census of Rhode Island^[3]. His household distribution and inferred attributions are

• one white male over 16: William
• one white female over 16: Clarissa
• two white females under 16: daughter Margaret and unknown

Sources

1. ↑ Arnold: vol. 6, Bristol births, page 88
2. ↑ Arnold: vol. 6, Bristol marriages, page 34
3. ↑ 1774 Census

• Arnold, James Newell. Vital Record of Rhode Island, 1636-1850 (Narragansett Historical Pub. Co., Providence, R.I., 1891)

• 1774 Rhode Island Census, Bristol, Page 2, Entry 17 — William M^cCarty; citing transcription by Robert Niles in Rhode Island Roots 33 p.140, September 2007.