By Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Volume I.

NOTE.

The Memoir here given to the public is based on a biographical sketch prepared by the writer at the request of the Massachusetts Historical Society for its Proceedings.  The questions involving controversies into which the Society could not feel called to enter are treated at considerable length in the following pages.  Many details are also given which would have carried the paper written for the Society beyond the customary limits of such tributes to the memory of its deceased members.  It is still but an outline which may serve a present need and perhaps be of some assistance to a future biographer.

I.

1814-1827.  To AEt. 13.  Birth and early years.

John Motley, the great-grandfather of the subject of this Memoir, came in the earlier part of the last century from Belfast in Ireland to Falmouth, now Portland, in the District, now the State of Maine.  He was twice married, and had ten children, four of the first marriage and six of the last.  Thomas, the youngest son by his first wife, married Emma, a daughter of John Wait, the first Sheriff of Cumberland County under the government of the United States.  Two of their seven sons, Thomas and Edward, removed from Portland to Boston in 1802 and established themselves as partners in commercial business, continuing united and prosperous for nearly half a century before the firm was dissolved.

The earlier records of New England have preserved the memory of an incident which deserves mention as showing how the historian’s life was saved by a quickwitted handmaid, more than a hundred years before he was born.  On the 29th of August, 1708, the French and Indians from Canada made an attack upon the town of Haverhill, in Massachusetts.  Thirty or forty persons were slaughtered, and many others were carried captive into Canada.

The minister of the town, Rev. Benjamin Rolfe, was killed by a bullet through the door of his house.  Two of his daughters, Mary, aged thirteen, and Elizabeth, aged nine, were sleeping in a room with the maid-servant, Hagar.  When Hagar heard the whoop of the savages she seized the children, ran with them into the cellar, and, after concealing them under two large washtubs, hid herself.  The Indians ransacked the cellar, but missed the prey.  Elizabeth, the younger of the two girls, grew up and married the Rev. Samuel Checkley, first minister of the “New South” Church, Boston.  Her son, Rev. Samuel Checkley, Junior, was minister of the Second Church, and his successor, Rev. John Lothrop, or Lathrop, as it was more commonly spelled, married his daughter.  Dr. Lothrop was great-grandson of Rev. John Lothrop, of Scituate, who had been imprisoned in England for nonconformity.  The Checkleys were from Preston Capes, in Northamptonshire.  The name is probably identical with that of the Chicheles or Chichleys, a well-known Northamptonshire family.