William Bowen: Two Revolutionary War Veterans

New Wavetop: William Bowen (Sr.) (1760-1854)

To orient ourselves:

Amanda Lydia (Walker) Callin (1856 - 1933) was my 2nd great-grandmother - one of My Sixteen. A few weeks ago, we talked about her maternal grandfather, William Bowen, Jr.:

Wavetops: William Bowen, Jr. (1783-1854)

Today we’re talking about his father - William Bowen (1760-1854) - and some of the speed bumps I ran over on my way to improving his WikiTree biography.

Edited ancestry chart for Amanda Lydia (Walker) Callin (1856 - 1933) from her WikiTree profile

After spending time on his son’s profile, I dug into William Bowen “Senior” (he never actually referred to himself that way, as far as I can tell) and found a lot of good, but poorly sourced, information on his Find-A-Grave page.

I’m not a stickler for a specific format of source citation, but if I’m looking at a fact and the “citation” that goes with it doesn’t give me enough information to find the same source, I can’t verify that the source was quoted accurately or determine whether the source is primary or secondary. I don’t need a perfect citation - I just need Good Enough.

We learned from the biography of William Bowen, Jr., that the Bowen family that migrated to Ohio came from Sempronius, Cayuga County, New York. The senior William Bowen was buried in the West Niles Rural Cemetery in Cayuga County, New York, but most of the documentary evidence cited on his Find-A-Grave page puts him in Warren, Bristol County, Rhode Island.

This is where verifying the sources becomes important. There is a lot of information on that Find-A-Grave memorial, and some of it seems to be mistranscribed (the poster put “American Civil War” when the dates clearly correspond to the Revolutionary War) or is separated from the source information.

Digging through this information and comparing it to what I could find and attached to my Ancestry page for William, I figured out that a Fold3.com copy of a pension claim from 1833 (which was already transcribed on Find-A-Grave, just not cited as such) presented 72-year-old William Bowen’s sworn statement of when he was born, where he lived, and where and when he served in the Revolutionary War.

This sworn statement tells us he was born in 1760 in Warren, Rhode Island, where he lived until “about three years after” the end of the war. In about 1786, I calculated, he moved to western Massachusetts for five years (the penmanship is hard to read, but it looks like “five”) before relocating to Sempronius, where he lived for 32 years. Near the end of his life, he moved back to his birthplace in Warren, where he applied for the benefits allowed to Revolutionary War soldiers by Congress in the 1832 Revolutionary War Pension Act. He gave detailed recollections of being enrolled in the Town of Warren and that he was called up to serve several month-long tours as part of the Rhode Island Line.

His first enlistment put him in Capt. Thomas Allen’s Company, in Col. John Cook’s Regiment for three months - from October to December 1776. He described his duties as guarding the shore of Narragansett Bay as a private in Capt. Allen’s Company when it was attached to Col. Archibald Crary’s Regt. of the Rhode Island Line.

Most of the other information posted by other researchers fits with this timeline, but there are a number of census and other records that don’t fit.

As it turns out, Fold3 and NARA have another sworn testament from another William Bowen - who served in the Rhode Island Line for two enlistments - under Capt. Christopher Garnder’s Company from May to December 1775, and under Capt. Nathaniel Hawkins Company from December 1775 to December 1776. He recalled being discharged at Peekskill, New York, having served in the Battles at York Island and Trenton. These battles took place while our William Bowen was guarding Narragansett Bay.

This second William Bowen gave his statement in 1819 in his home of Grafton, New Hampshire - about 300 miles east of Sempronius, New York. Census records say he was born in Connecticut, and there are several muster rolls and other documents that don’t match our William’s description of his service in Rhode Island that might be evidence of this other William’s service.

Now that I know which William Bowen is mine, it is a lot easier to make sense of the other documents - and with a sworn statement supporting what can be found in the Rhode Island vital records, I’m a lot more comfortable accepting the records that tie William Bowen Jr. to his father.¹

Incidentally, all of this digging led me to the 2011 New England Historical and Genealogical Register article on William Bowen (Sr.)’s family.² Rather than feeling frustrated that I re-did all this work, I feel pretty good about my skills at finding most of the same sources cited in the NEHGR report, and for finding the 1850 Census record that eluded Cherry Bamberg.

Are you related to any of these Bowens? Hit that “Leave a comment” button and say hello!

1. Coincidentally, I learned about these Rhode Island sources working on the John Greene branch of my tree - and wrote about them here:

Simple Statements of Fact

2. Bamberg, Cherry Fletcher, "Nathaniel and Esther (Carpenter) (Bardeen) Bowen and Their Family," ''The New England Historical and Genealogical Register'', <https://www.americanancestors.org/DB202/i/12636/53/24451527> Vol 165 (2011), pp. 53-61; Boston, MA.