I can’t believe I’ve been working on this week’s post for over six weeks. Ostensibly, I’ve been preparing to write about my Great x4 Grandmother, Miriam Fellows. What started out as updating my research on her turned into a deep dive into her ancestors, in some cases going as far back as her Great x3 Grandparents.
What probably triggered the trip down the rabbit hole was my interest in Miriam’s mother, Leah Huxley.
I’ve always been intrigued by Leah Huxley, not because I knew all that much about her. It’s just that her name is remarkably close to Sandra Bullock’s character in the most excellent movie, Demolition Man, who was named Lenina Huxley. (Who in was named in reference to Lenina Crowne, from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I much prefer Demolition Man to Brave New World)
So imagine my dismay when I discovered Leah’s name might not have been Leah at all. She may have been named Martha at birth. Sure, it’s an extremely far cry from a Non-Paternity Event, but I was disappointed to learn that this fun fact might not be a fact at all. That’s not fun.
Turns out she is both Martha and Leah. It seems fairly clear that she was likely registered as Martha at birth, according to the vital records of Suffield, Connecticut. However, her name was recorded as Leah when she married her husband, Joseph Fellows. As well, the birth records of most of her children named her as Leah.
It may be that the forename in the birth record was a transcription error, recording Leah using her mother’s name by mistake. Alternatively, she might have been named Martha at birth, but used the name Leah to differentiate herself from her mother, who was also named Martha. So crisis averted, she’ll always be Leah Huxley to me.
Through Leah and Joseph, Miriam had deep roots in New England, particularly Connecticut. Miriam was born on April 24, 1773, the tenth of eleven children. She, and likely all of her siblings, was born in Canaan, Connecticut. All of Martha’s paternal Great Grandparents were born in New England; the same can be said for all of her maternal Great x2 Grandparents. As far as I have discerned so far, all of her ancestors hailed from England, and most of her forebears came to the New World in the 1640s.
Despite everything I learned in the last six weeks, very little of it was about Miriam.
While Miriam was from Canaan, in the northwest corner of Connecticut, her husband, Daniel Cook, was from Preston, 100 kilometers away in southeast Connecticut. I have no idea how they came to meet, but they married in Preston, Connecticut on April 1, 1796. Within two years, Miriam and Daniel had moved to Kingsbury, New York, where they had six children together. Miriam passed away sometime in 1830*, likely in Kingsbury, five years after her husband died.
That’s it – essentially one paragraph. It’s a bit unsatisfying after all the time I spent trying to learn about her, but at least I’ve learned a lot about her people and where they came from.
* I caught a typo in my post for October 6, 2025 about Henry Lyman Cook, which had Miriam as having lived from 1773 to 1796. However, the latter date is when she married, not when she died.
A Deck of Ancestors 