Vera Butterfield died of burns received when she lighted a fire with kerosene.

Soldier of the Revolutionary War, being a member of Capt. John Gray's company in Colonel Jonathan Mitchell's regiment, that took part in the Penobscot expedition. He was in the service nine months, In after life, he was a prominent and respected citizen of North Yarmouth, and afterwards of Cumberland, filling for many years offices of trust. He was a member of the Convention that framed the Constitution of Maine, and was repeatedly chosen to the State Senate.

An unquest was held on the death of this child, and the verdict returned,
15 May 1744, by a jury of fifteen, was that he had met his death by
falling into a tub of water. (Suffolk Court Records, MS).

Rev. Dr. Mather Byles was a brilliant prose writer and preacher, a poet
of considerable note, the most celebrated humorist of Boston in his day,
and a dominating personality in the town before and at the time of the
Revolution. Educated at Harvard College, class of 1725, he entered , 20
Dec 1732, on his long pastorate of forty-three years at the newly founded
Hollis Street Church in Boston with an equipment and prestige that few,
if any, ministers or literary men of his time in New England enjoyed.
From the University of Aberdeen he received in 1765 the degree of D.D.;
and as pastor of the Hollis Street Church he continued until August 1776,
when on account of his well-known dislike of the Revolution and his
declared friendship with the Loyalist party, amidst recrimination and
intense bitterness, he was summarily dismissed from his church. In May
1777 he was denounced in town meeting, with many others, as a person
dangerous to the state; and on 2 Jun 1777 he was tried by the Court of
Sessions and condemned to be put on board a guard ship and in forty days
transported to Europe or the West Indies. For some reason, however,
possibly on account of his advanced age, the sentence of banishment was
not carried out, the authorities contenting themselves with keeping him
for a few weeks a prisoner in his house, before which they placed a
guard. In retirement, with his two daughters, and in straightened
circumstances, he lived in his house, Nassau Green" in what became
Tremont Street, until 1788, when on 5 July, after a lingering illness,
which had begun with a stroke of paralysis in 1783, he died.

Church of England clergyman and versifier; Mather Byles came from a distinguished Puritan background. He was the great-grandson of the clergyman Increase Mother and a grandnephew of the colonial governor Jonathan Belcher; his father was a well-known tory Congregational minister, poet, and wit. A precocious boy, Byles entered Harvard College at the age of 12 and graduated in 1751. He was later to receive the degree of ma from Harvard in 1754 and from Yale College in 1757, and he obtained a dd from Oxford in 1770. Byres was happily married three times: to Rebecca Walter on 12 May 1761 in Roxbury (Boston); to Sarah Lyde on 10 Feb. 1777 in Halifax, N.S.; and on 2 Oct. 1788, also in Halifax, to Susanna Reid, née Lawlor, who proved a good mother to his 13 children by his first two unions. His descendants include a number of outstanding Nova Scotia families, one of his daughters having married William James Almon and two others a son and grandson of Thomas Desbrisay.

In 1757, after two years as librarian of Harvard College, Byres became a liberal Congregational minister in New London, Conn. In 1768 he was converted to the Church of England, went to England where he received a licence from the bishop of London, and then took up duties as minister of Christ Church, Boston, and missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. After a stormy tenure with a Whiggish congregation, he resigned and would have taken up a position in Portsmouth, N.H., had the outbreak of hostilities not prevented him. In 1776 he fled with the British troops to Halifax, where he lived precariously as chaplain to the garrison and assistant to the rectors of St Paul’s Church. In May 1784 he went to England to press his claims for compensation as a loyalist. Awarded £120 and an annual pension of £100 in the form of “a perfect Sinecure,” the lifetime chaplaincy of the Halifax garrison, he returned to Halifax in May 1785.

In August 1788 Byres visited Saint John, N.B., and received a “Unanimous” call to become rector of Trinity Church. He moved there with his family in May 1789. At first the congregation met in temporary quarters, but on Christmas morning 1791 Byres conducted the first service in the newly built church that became the centre of loyalist, Anglican worship in Saint John. It was also supported by the Presbyterians, who had no minister, and thus was frequently overcrowded. Byres served with distinction until early 1814 when he went blind. He died on 12 March 1814 in the very chair in which his father and grandfather had died.

Byres was paternalistic and somewhat puritanical and cynical. He was not impressed by England, the Anglican episcopacy, or the whole “dissipated Age.” Unlike many loyalists he was not awed by aristocracy or royalty, refusing, for example, to act “like a Fool” by attending a dinner in Halifax for Prince William Henry. But like many loyalists he was not bitter towards the United States: “I wish my Country-Men Joy on the Attainment of their wishes.” He was erudite and a competent satirist. In Halifax he gave vent to his frustrations by ridiculing in verse many of the city’s leading citizens in a way, Governor John Parr* complained, “unbefitting a man of God.”

Byres was a cantankerous individual, quarrelling in Halifax with his fellow clerics, John Breynton*, Henry Caner, and Joshua Wingate Weeks, but remaining friendly with Bishop Charles Inglis. He did not like Nova Scotia, leaving “without the least Regret . . . the most contemptible [area] my Eyes ever beheld”: “I desire never to forget that the most irreligious People I ever knew were at the same Time the most ignorant, the most stupid, & the most unhappy.” In contrast, he was happy in New Brunswick partly because he liked his job. He reported to his famous loyalist sisters, Katherine and Mary, who continued to reside in Boston, that “it has pleased a good God to gild your Brother’s Evening Sky”: “I am connected with as worthy a People as I ever knew.”

Wallace Brown

A portrait of Mather Byres by his nephew Mather Brown, now in the possession of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., is reproduced in Shipton, infra.

PAC, MG 23, D6, 1: 21, 35, 41, 56, 58–59, 63, 66–67 (transcripts). A catalogue of all graduates in divinity, law, medicine, arts and music who have regularly proceeded or been created to the University of Oxford, between October 10, 1659, and December 31, 1850 . . . (Oxford, 1851). Shipton, Sibley’s Harvard graduates, 13: 6–26. A. C. Potter and C. K. Bolton, The librarians of Harvard College, 1667–1877 (Cambridge, Mass., 1897). A. W. H. Eaton, The famous Mather Byres: the noted Boston tory preacher, poet, and wit, 1707–1788 (Boston, 1914). [This book is about Byles’s father but contains much on the son. w.b.]

Soldier in Capt. Samuel Noyes company.

A direct descendant of Robert Calph, a merchant in Beston, who died in 1720. He was auther of "More Wonders of the Invisible World," a satire on Cotton Mather's "Wenders of the Inviaible World." It was published in London, in 1700. When Dr. Increase Mather was president of Harvard College, he ordered the "wicked book of Calph" to be burnt in the college yard. Hutchinson, who was nearly related to the Mathers, speaks of Robert Calph as "a man of fair mind and substantiates his facts."

She did not marry John Glover as given in Glover & Capen Genealogies & Thayer Mem.

Estate of Samuel Capen May 29,1721 was settled on son Samuel who was to pay "legal representatives of Ann Spear, dec.", etc.

When about fourteen years of age he came to Gorham, and learned the trade of a mason of William B. Harding, at which trade, however, he never worked. After having been employed for some years as clerk in the Robie store in 1848, he entered into partnership with his brother-in-law, Joseph Ridlon, which partnership lasted til 1879, when Mr. Card went into business for himself. For nine years Mr. Card was town clerk of Gorham.

Lived 81 years on the same farm; at the age of 21 he was baptized by Rev. Wilbur Fisk, and from that time till his death was an esteemed member of the Methodist Episcopal Church; a reader and patron of Zion's Herald from its origin, abreast of the times in general intelligence; substantial, judicious, earnest, liberal, and faithful, retaining his official standing to the last, he exerted a helpful influence of more than ordinary potency.

He was a manufacturer of wood-working machinery, was an inventor, having taken out a dozen patents of various kinds; a man greatly respected, and a long-time resident of Lowell, Mass.

Nathaniel sold his home estate in 1798 to his grandson, Nathaniel Kilpatrick [Cumberland Co. deeds 38:278].

(Maine Families says the g/s says 8 Apr 1776.)