It is probable that his private affairs now occupied his attention.  A year or so after the surrender of Montreal he was married to Elizabeth, daughter of Rev. Arthur Brown, Rector of St. John’s Church, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  He considered this town his residence, and in papers executed this very year (1764) sometimes designates himself “as of Portsmouth,” and at others, as “now residing at Portsmouth.”

For three or four years, between 1762 and 1765, he trafficked a good deal in lands, buying and selling numerous and some quite extensive tracts.  Some twenty-five different conveyances to him are on record in the Recorder’s office of Rockingham County, and half as many from him to other parties.

Some of these lands he seems to have purchased and some to have received in consideration of military services.  In 1764 Benning Wentworth, as Governor of New Hampshire, conveyed to him as “a reduced officer” a tract of three thousand acres, lying in the southern part of Vermont.

One[A] conveyance made by him and bearing date December 20, 1762, arrests our attention.  By it he transferred to his father-in-law, Rev. Arthur Brown, before mentioned, some five hundred acres of land in Rumford (now Concord, New Hampshire) together with “one negro man, named Castro Dickerson, aged about twenty-eight; one negro woman, named Sylvia; one negro boy named Pomp, aged about twelve and one Indian boy, named Billy, aged about thirteen.”  For what reason this property was thus transferred I have no means of knowing.  If the object of the conveyance was to secure it as a home to his wife and children against any liabilites he might incur in his irregular life, the end sought was subsequently attained, as the land descended even to his grand-children.[B]

[Footnote A:  The old “Rogers house,” so called, is still standing upon the former estate of Major Rogers, on the east side and near the south end of Main Street, in Concord, New Hampshire.  It must be at least a hundred years old, and faces the South, being two stories high on the front side and descending by a long sloping roof to one in the rear.  It was occupied for many years by Captain and Mrs. Roach, and later by Arthur, son of Major Rogers, who was a lawyer by profession and died at Portsmouth, in 1841.]

[Footnote B:  A portion of this estate was subsequently sold by his descendants to the late Governor Isaac Hill, of Concord, New Hampshire.]

And I may as well, perhaps, just here and now anticipate a little by saying that Major Rogers did not prove a good husband, and that seventeen years after their marriage his wife felt constrained, February 12, 1778, to petition the General Assembly of New Hampshire for a divorce from him on the ground of desertion and infidelity.  An act granting the same passed the Assembly on the twenty-eighth day of February and the Council on the fourth of March following.[A]

[Footnote A:  “An act to dissolve the marriage between Robert Rogers and Elizabeth, his wife.