{"id":5722,"date":"2016-01-04T20:15:41","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T04:15:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/?p=5722"},"modified":"2020-01-31T14:07:48","modified_gmt":"2020-01-31T22:07:48","slug":"alonzo-bailey-an-american-industrialist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blackenedroots.com\/blog\/alonzo-bailey-an-american-industrialist\/","title":{"rendered":"Alonzo Bailey, an American industrialist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Alonzo<\/a>With the new year, I’d like to get back in the habit of\u00a0writing more blog entries on family history. I thought that one way I might gather up steam is to profile some new ancestors that haven’t yet been featured on the pages on this blog.<\/p>\n

To start things off, I thought I’d write up what I know or could learn about my great-great-great-grandfather Alonzo Bailey (1799-1867). I thought this would be a quick blog post to research and write, as I knew next to nothing about Alonzo when I started writing this post over a week\u00a0ago, but I’ve since realized that I’ll need at least three\u00a0blog posts to cover what I’ve learned about this previously mysterious yet\u00a0now impressive and fascinating man. Because of the growing size of this post and the ongoing\u00a0discoveries I’m making, I’ll declare\u00a0this post done for now and will update it with new information as\u00a0I find it.<\/p>\n

Alonzo Bailey was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, on December 14, 1799, to William Bailey (1768-1848) and Lucretia Tracy (1774-1859). He was the eldest of a family that would grow to include six children\u2014three sons and three daughters. Alonzo was the first-born child in William and Lucretia’s young family, and he\u00a0appears to have been a honeymoon child, having been born nine months and a week after his parents were married on March 6, 1799, in Franklin, Connecticut.<\/p>\n

Lebanon is about 9\u00bd miles from Franklin according to a table of distances from an 1854 map of New London County<\/a> (see here for the full resolution version<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Why did they move to Lebanon? Quite simply, it was where the Bailey family lived in recent generations. Alonzo’s father William was born in Lebanon in 1768, his grandfather Isaac (1732-1817) was born and spent his entire life in Lebanon, and his great-grandfather Isaac (1708-1791) was born in\u00a0Stonington on the coast but his family had moved to Lebanon by the time he was one year old. His great-great-grandfather Isaac (1681-1771) moved from Massachusetts to Killingworth, CT, by the time he was two years old, and when he grew up he was the one who was\u00a0responsible for settling the Bailey family in Lebanon around 1708.<\/p>\n

Alonzo’s\u00a0great-great-great-grandfather, the\u00a0Rev. James Bailey (1650-1707), was born in Salem, MA, in 1650. James graduated from Harvard College in 1669 and served as\u00a0a preacher in Salem Village beginning in 1671 and continuing until 1681. His ministry at Salem Village and the feuds he had with other preachers were\u00a0apparently the cause of much dissension in Salem and fed\u00a0the bitterness that led to\u00a0the witchcraft persecutions culminating a decade later in the witchcraft trials of 1692. In fact, it was this negative experience in Salem that led the Bailey family to first relocate to Connecticut.<\/p>\n

As Alonzo is as far removed in generations from his ancestor James Bailey as I am from Alonzo, I doubt that Alonzo heard\u00a0much (or even anything) about the Rev. James Bailey, unless Alonzo had an interest in family history that I have not yet uncovered.<\/p>\n

The 1800 federal census finds Alonzo and his parents living in their home in Lebanon, Connecticut:<\/p>\n

\"1800<\/a><\/p>\n

While only William Bailey is listed by name, the other household members are listed by sex and age category:<\/p>\n