Foster

 

          The name of Foster (in New Jersey) is found as early as the founding of Fenwick’s Colony (a Quaker colony founded in 1675 in the Penn’s Neck section of New Jersey).  We find a Thomas Foster listed as a professional weaver in 1696 who made garments for the local people.  The name of Foster in West Jersey is mentioned in Shroud’s “History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony”, about the year 1700 when Hall and Cox of Burlington held out inducements to purchasers to emigrate from New York and elsewhere.  Foster, Peck, Harris, Preston and several other families, most of them Presbyterians, purchased lands in Deerfield, now Cumberland County.  At about the same time, the DuBois, VanMeter, Newkirk (Nieukirk) and other families bought lands of Cox & Hall in Pittsgrove, formerly Pilesgrove.  We find throughout the various Foster lines of the region, these other names through intermarriage.

 

          In tracing the Foster line in New Jersey, several difficulties had to be overcome   The areas in which the various Foster lines settled underwent name changes (East Jersey and West Jersey - during the Proprietary Era (prior to 1677); Cumberland County being carved out of Salem County in the 1747/8 time period and Salem County itself being carved out of Cape May county, recognized as such in 1692; separation of jurisdictions such as “South of the Cohansey” and “North of the Cohansey” without benefit of County explanation; and places such as “Pittsgrove” being formerly known as “Pilesgrove”.

 

          Early genealogies and lineages were rarely kept by most families in developing sections of the country, and the recurrence of common names (Christopher, Jeremiah, Judah, John, Hannah, etc), without associations and relationships makes lineage tracing extremely difficult.  And too, overlapping record books (clerk records, marriage records, etc.) has resulted in references of births, deaths and marriages, many with the same names but no

 

The Revolutionary War also caused much turmoil in the South New Jersey area - Mahlon to whom we can accurately trace, has unrecorded parents and birth.  During that time, many births, marriages and deaths went unreported - fighting being prevalent in the South Jersey-Philadelphia-Eastern Pennsylvania area.  Indeed, cattle were herded from South New Jersey to Valley Forge to feed troops stationed there, and one of the young Fosters of the time died there.

 

          These factors, taken together, have necessarily caused certain assumptions to be made (common dates, place names, family names, etc.) in the following lineage (for future researchers to unravel!)

 

          We had scant clues to follow

 

                -       &     a flyleaf from a family Bible listing the children of Mahlon (later found to be of Port Elizabeth, NJ - a blacksmith by trade) listing birth dates only,

 

                -       &     family verbal history indicating that there were a lot of Christophers in the family; that they came from England  to New England  (but no one knew how Mahlon came to New Jersey)

 

                -       &     a sampler stitched by a Hannah Foster, age 14, (copy provided to us by the Cumberland Historical Society) which stated “Four brothers came from England  - Jonathan, Ephraim, Samuel and David Foster, and settled in New England, Long Island, East Jersey and Cape May”, going on and giving only the lineage of Samuel, down  four generations.  (Little did Hannah know that in all of the genealogies of southern New Jersey (particularly Cape May) did those four brothers fit, even as having come first from England .)  And little did she know :                   

 

                             a.      that the descendants of Samuel placed his line within 5 to 10 miles of the area where Mahlon was placed, leading to a conclusion that Mahlon, born c. 1760, might be part of that line,

 

                             b.      that those descendants indeed served in the same militia as Mahlon and attended the same church where Mahlon was an elder, and

 

c.        a grandson of her “Jeremiah Foster, of Deerfield, and Patience” (on the sampler as a son of her Samuel) founded Millville, New Jersey  (10 miles from Port Elizabeth) with Joseph Buck (a family name is “Buck” without any explanation) and that grandson married Amy Foster, daughter of Josiah Foster and Amy Borden (of the “Bordentown” New Jersey Bordens) tying into family verbal history.  But nowhere were found “a lot of Christophers” in the same line, until additional internet research led to Foster marriages into the Hand line in southern New Jersey, bringing about the most possible and probable “Christopher”, leading to the New England “Christopher”.

 

d.    And even more surprising was the discovery that our original Christopher Foster was at Lynn, MA at the same time as was Joseph   Jenks,  immigrant of our other line.

 

          But we did have practically all of the genealogies of Fosters available by computer access - gathered as a part of this research of all of our lines (and just to see if there was a Mahlon among them), as well as those available in the Miami Public Library’s comprehensive resources.

 

          And we did have  (from the Cumberland County Historical Society and Library) a comprehensive list of New Jersey tax payers (1772-1822) listing the southern counties and townships of the taxpayers.

 

          And we did have extensive data gathered by Rev. James C. Stormont and his wife Edith Foster Stormont from Mahlon onward .

 

          The end result of all that data gathering was a listing of over a thousand entries of all tax payers and of all southern New Jersey Foster birth, marriage and death dates, sorted by names, dates, counties and townships which reinforced dates and locations tying together the Fosters, Hands and Howells of the Cape May, NJ area.

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

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