THE Pennsylvania Magazine OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY VOLUME LX JULY, 1936 NUMBER THREE THOMAS CHEYNEY, A CHESTER COUNTY SQUIRE: HIS LESSON FOR GENEALOGISTS* MUST at the very beginning make two confessions} in the first place, the formal subject of this address is largely an excuse for I introducing the subject indicated in the sub-title. I want to give a sketch of this plain country squire as a pretext for saying something about the relations between genealogy and history. I have long felt that genealogists are wasteful of their opportunities and do not do their fair share, or at least do not do as much as they might, toward the great object to which this Society and this building are dedicated, the increase of our knowledge of the past. There are no more industrious, more intelligent, and more devoted workers in old records than those engaged in genealogical research. There are few persons engaged in any kind of research who are brought into contact with such vivid and such enlightening sources of historical information. Yet they often come back from their rich harvest fields not, like reapers, loaded with heavy sheaves of historical knowledge, but, like gleaners, with only a scanty store of names and dates and relationships. This somewhat amateur intrusion of a student of history into the unfamiliar field of genealogy is intended to test the correctness of this statement. Secondly, I must confess that my interest in this Chester County Squire, Thomas Cheyney, is greater because his name is the same as * An address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society, May 11, 1936. VOL. LX.—14 209 210 EDWARD P. CHEYNEY July my own, though he is not my direct ancestor. I do not know that I need make any excuse for this interest. It is a common human proclivity} at least it is a normal interest of our later lives. The historian Gibbon in the introductory paragraph of his Autobiography remarks: "A lively desire of knowing and of recording our ancestors so generally prevails that it must depend on the influence of some common prin- ciple in the minds of men. We seem to have lived in the persons of our forefathers.... Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which nature has confined us. Fifty or a hundred years may be allotted to an individual, but we step forward beyond death with such hopes as religion and philosophy will suggest; and we fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by associating ourselves to the authors of our existence... • The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach, but reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind." When we are young usually we take little interest in our ancestry. We ourselves and those about us are too important in our eyes and too personal to be looked upon as merely the progeny of those who have gone before; too clearly individualized to be considered only as mem- bers of a clan. Somewhere about middle life, however, the idea of family continuity, of the fact that we are the descendants of our fore- fathers, that we are somewhat like beads on a string, grows upon us. It is then, unfortunately, mostly too late to get the best results. It is a familiar experience that, by the time we have become really in- terested in our ancestors, so many of those who could have answered our questions about them have passed on that we are driven for the most part to written records for our information. The death of the older members of the family is one of the irreparable losses of life. So much for introduction. Now for the man himself. He lived in Thornbury Township in that part of Chester County that has since been separated from the rest as Delaware County. His house was of the familiar type of eastern Pennsylvania farmhouses, built of native stone—mica-schist, with occasional black heads of hornblend and rusty pieces of quartz to break the uniformity, the delight of archi- tects, the envy of New Englanders and Southerners who live in frame houses. It still lies nestled in a fold of the low hills of that region. Here he lived his eighty years, and his remains lie in the family graveyard on the top of a hill nearby where, on every 1936 A CHESTER COUNTY SQUIRE 211 Memorial Day, they are now decorated by the more patriotic of his descendants. His people were already well established on Chester County soil. He was of the third generation in this country. The family had taken literally the Biblical injunction to go forth and mul- tiply and replenish this new land. He was the oldest of five children and himself had nine. His younger brother, my great-grandfather, had fourteen} one of his sons had eight children, another six. One brother had a large farm adjoining his own, another had a sawmill on Chester Creek 5 some of the family were scattered on farms in that region j one relative had a country store, another was a saddler, and still others migrated west and south. Thomas Cheyney was born in 1731. He was all his life a farmer, although, as will appear, he had public duties which must often have interfered with those of the farm. In 1778, when he was forty-seven years old, he was made a justice of the peace and his docket book, from that year to 1803, lies among the manuscripts of this Library in the gallery above this room. During the Revolution, from 1777 to 1783, he was one of the six sublieutenants of Chester County. His accounts for those years, in printed form, are also preserved in this Library. In his later years, from 1792 to 1796, he opened up a lively correspondence with some English relations and friends of the family. He kept copies of these letters and these copies are preserved among the Chester County papers in the manuscript room above us. There are, besides, a number of letters to and from him in the Persifor Fraser correspondence, a few other scattered documents, and the usual mass of unverified and unverifiable tradition which is the temptation and the despair of the biographer and the historian. From this material emerges a somewhat well-marked personality. The period of his life is an interesting one, covering later colonial times, the critical years of the Revolution and three decades after its close. He seems to have been well-to-do, at least there are no com- plaints of privation beyond the harshness of the elements j and, since he owned his farm, and since such wheat as was sold then seldom brought less than a dollar and seventy-five cents a bushel, and such farm implements as were used were of home or local manufacture, not raised in price by a protective tariff, he did not have to meet the problems of the modern farmer's low prices of his product, high prices of his farming equipment and enhanced interest on his mortgage. His 212 EDWARD P. CHEYNEY July education must have been mediocre to say the least. His expressions are good and his handwriting at least as good as that of some of his descendants, but his spelling is execrable. The old "Shady Grove Schoolhouse," which lies on the Street-Road at the edge of his place, where my father went to school, may have been in existence then, but was probably the product of a much later campaign for public educa- tion. He gives little evidence of wide reading. On the other hand he seems rather to have liked to write long letters, and occasionally he drops into poetry. For instance, while his neighbor Persifor Frazer, then Colonel in the American army, was with the troops at Ticonderoga, Squire Chey- n&y one time visited Mrs. Frazer and, to relieve her depression, re- cited some verses he pretended he had heard in a dream the previous night sung by a voice emerging from a bottle on his candle stand: Cheerful spirits here we'll stay, And guard against despotic sway $ Though Britain's numerous frightful fleet Makes oceans groan in wrath, its weight And guns and drums cry out so loud To appease the vengeance of their Lord, Yet America will be free Yet America will be free. and so through three more bad stanzas. I am afraid this poem belongs among the traditions I have spoken of, but some authority is given to it from the fact that such verses under the heading "Squire Cheyney's Dream" are to be found in more than one early collection. There is, however, positive evidence of his poetical predilections in verses which remain, written by his own hand, in his docket book. Some are mere doggerel. He records, for instance, that the 19th of January 1790, was "very foggy and windy," then drops into rhyme: I have lived 58 years the 12 of last December And so far never seen such a winter that I remember. Another is rather too broad for our more refined age. Still another is more serious in character. Like many other farmers of eastern Penn- sylvania, he had one or two or more slaves who served in the house- hold rather than in the fields. For instance, among the plunder the 1936 A CHESTER COUNTY SQUIRE 213 British seized from his neighbor Persifor Frazer and carried to Phila- delphia with them on their march north, after the Battle of Brandy- wine, were a negro girl named Rachel and another woman.