Elizabeth Smallwood, widow Fuller

Warning

• Marriage record says "Fuller" is surname, but she may have been Widow Fuller at that point
• Not the same as Elizabeth Tannenberg .
• Not the sister of Hannah Slemmer . They were married in the same church a few years apart. It appears Hannah was the sister of Elizabeth Tanneberger instead.

Life story

While Elizabeth was named "Elizabeth Fuller" on her marriage record to Manly Smallwood, she was not born a Fuller. Elizabeth's first husband was likely Samuel Fuller, a descendant of the New England Mayflower Fullers, who shortly after marrying Elizabeth apparently died in the Revolutionary War. His comrade in arms, Manly Smallwood, then married his widow, as was common practice in that day.

Elizabeth's parents came from Staten Island, New York. They were Paton Parmer and Mary Wood. Mary was a daughter of Jacob Wood and Johanna Daniels, while Paton Parmer had been born in the London area and had arrived in New York as a child some time around 1744.

Both Paton and Mary came from Baptist families. Indeed, many of their siblings and cousins took part in the migration from the Staten Island area to what is now Belfast Township, Fulton County, PA, where they established an early Baptist community. Elizabeth's parents did not go to central Pennsylvania; instead, they settled in Gloucester County, New Jersey, where Elizabeth was born.

Elizabeth's mother Mary came from a long line of women who gave birth to twins. Elizabeth may have had a brother Richard Parmer who fought in the American Revolution, possibly alongside Manly Smallwood and Samuel Fuller. There are records for such a person, but they do not give an age - but if he was a son of Paton and Mary, he would have had to be a twin of Elizabeth's.

No further Parmer children are known for Paton and Mary, and indeed we know nothing else about them. It is therefore possible that Mary died in childbirth and Paton either remarried or died soon himself thereafter. There were, however, many first cousins of Paton's in the Philadelphia and New Jersey area, so the Parmer twins did survive, possibly in the household of Joseph or Richard Parmer, brothers of Paton who also stayed in Philadelphia for a time.

Married life

After Samuel died, Elizabeth married Manly Smallwood, who also fought in the Revolution and rose to the rank of Colonel. Manly and Elizabeth established themselves in Northern Liberties (a part of Philadelphia), and had a large family.

Children of Manly and Elizabeth:

1. Priscillia Middleton, b. 1785
2. Aaron Smallwood, b. 1787
3. Mary Smallwood, b. 1788
4. Margaret Peacock, b. 1790
5. Manly Smallwood, b. 1791
6. John Hewson Smallwood, b. 1793
7. Elizabeth Smallwood, b. 1794
8. Edith Ross Smallwood, b. 1796
9. Isaac Smallwood, b. 1798

Elizabeth died in Northern Liberties in 1802. Her husband remarried to Susanna Weeks.

Research facts

• Some web trees claim her father was named "Samuel Fuller"
• A male descendant was named "Lemuel"
• Was married in the German Reformed Church in Philadelphia
• Attended Methodist church services at the Old St. George Methodist Church for her entire adult life, along with husband Manly and brother-in-law Peter
• Had all of her early children baptized there on May 21,1797
• Named a later daughter after fellow parishioner Elizabeth Ross
• Named her firstborn son "Aaron", which is a common name among the New England Fullers
• Lived in Northern Liberties
• Died before 1802 (when her husband remarried)
• Elizabeth had all her children baptized Methodist en masse in 1797. Prior to that they had not been baptized. This implies she was born a Baptist.

Other Fullers in Philadelphia at the time

See:

• John Fuller (German immigrant with traditional Germanic family).
• Benjamin Fuller (Irish Quaker).
• Daniel Fuller (Only one record in Philadelphia at all)

What is ruled out

• Elizabeth cannot be the daughter of John Fuller, of Philadelphia . She was not mentioned in his will. But she could have married (first) one of his sons.
• Elizabeth is unlikely to be the daughter of John Fuller , even though she married in the same church as Hannah. Such a marriage would leave numerous DNA matches completely unexplained, and there is already an Elizabeth in that family (who married a Tanneberger).

Search for origins

The effort that has gone into untangling Elizabeth's life has been extensive, and is worthy of a small book. Much of it has involved thorough DNA analysis, described in a separate section below.

The constraints on Elizabeth's origins are as follows:

• Elizabeth was a descendant of the Avery family, of Devonshire, and then of Groton, Connecticut. This means she was likely descended from a Potts, a Miner, a Daniels, or an Avery. Daniels is the most likely because this family established itself in northern New Jersey at around exactly the right time, in Woodbridge.
• Elizabeth is the granddaughter of Johanna Daniels Wood, and her uncle was Captain John Wood. She is also the first cousin of John Noah Mellott .

Once I realized that one of Elizabeth's parents was surnamed Wood, it became possible to search for marriages involving that surname. Here, there was a lucky break. A Middlesex County, New Jersey, marriage was recorded at just the right time between a Mary Wood, of Staten Island, and a Paton Parmer, also of Staten Island. This marriage took place a bit more than a year before Elizabeth was born in Waterford, present-day Camden County, New Jersey, and is the key piece of evidence tying Elizabeth to the Parmer family.

Other facts point to a Staten Island residence for Elizabeth's Wood grandparents - specifically, probable uncle Captain John Wood was said to have been born in New York City in 1739, and other marriages suggested by DNA also seem to have occurred in the same area prior to 1764. If Mary Wood was Johanna Daniels' daughter, it implies that the Wood family lived across the river from Johanna's father Jonathan Daniels, of Woodbridge NJ., which made sense since Johanna received 20 pounds according to Jonathan's 1764 will, and Jonathan only rewarded children that lived nearby at the time of his death.

Research into Paton Parmer revolves around the surname "Parmer" and it's relation to the surname "Palmer". I have concluded that these two were not the same, although I do have some evidence that at least one Parmer became a Palmer. Records from this family include several marriage records in Middlesex County NJ, the Staten Island area, as well as an association between John Amos Palmer, who I think was initially a Parmer, and the group of people who left Staten Island and settled in Bedford County, PA around 1764. Some of this group later went on to Belmont County, Ohio - among them, other descendants of Johanna Wood. If this is correct, the Parmers were an English immigrant family, who arrived in the New York area around 1740.

As for the fact that Elizabeth was born in Camden County, not Middlesex County or Staten Island, there is an implication that Paton, at least, and maybe some of Paton's siblings must have settled in the Philadelphia area. I have no records from anywhere for a Paton Parmer or Palmer of that era, but there was a Joseph Parmer recorded in Waterford around the right time.

DNA evidence

A particular chunk of DNA on Chromosome 16 shared by three persons seems to have originated in the Avery family. A genealogical link between two of the matches goes via the Averys of Groton, Connecticut.

A different chunk of DNA on Chromosome 1 is shared among a number of persons who are Canadian descendants of Captain John Wood, or of John Noah Mellott . This argues that somewhere in Elizabeth's ancestry, there are Woods. And, indeed, we know that one daughter of Jonathan Daniels, Johanna, married a Wood. With DNA, however, we can surmise that she is likely the ancestor of all of these lines.

(A prior DNA analysis, while correct, incorrectly identified the actual ancestor that the DNA chunk originated from as being the Dubois family. A further overlapping DNA match that was analyzed points instead at that stretch originating in the County Fermanagh Armstrong clan. This has been confirmed with a known Armstrong-descended DNA match with a similar overlap.)

A similar analysis done earlier - which still stands and has been confirmed multiple times - led to the conclusion that Elizabeth Fuller was descended from Capt. James Avery . This ties her back to New England through one of two paths: either the Daniels family, descendants of the Averys through Mary Potts, or the Chipman/Chapman family, descendants of the Averys through the Miners. Both went south, but as far as is known, the Miner-descend Chipmans did not venture south of Long Island (although they seem to have been confused with a Delaware family that may have been Chipman cousins).

Instead, as described above, we now have evidence that Elizabeth Smallwood's mother or father was the child of Johanna Daniels, who married a Wood (according to Jonathan Daniels' will), and (the DNA tells us) was the mother of Captain John Wood, b. 1739, a Revolutionary War veteran who eventually emigrated to Leeds County, Ontario, with most of his family. Other DNA relationships for this stretch of DNA include descendants of Tory sympathizers descended from George Ferris, of Rye, New York, and his middle wife Margaret Ferris, who was likely another Daniels daughter who died young. Her children all fled the New York area - one of them signed the UEL pledge in New Brunswick CA, another married a Tory who signed the pledge there too, etc. A descendant of John Noah Mellott occupy the same DNA area, as does a descendant of Hannah Jacques. Other DNA matches include descendants of Jotham James Hildreth and Judson Galpin, both of whom had children who went to British Canada as well. One family sharing this match is a descendant of William Buck Morris, Sr, another Bedford County PA immigrant who went to the Carolinas.

References

• Elizabeth Fuller in the Pennsylvania, Compiled Marriage Records, 1700-1821 Name: Elizabeth Fuller Marriage Date: 24 Feb 1785 Marriage Place: German Reformed Church, Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Spouse's name: Manly Smallwood Source Information Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Compiled Marriage Records, 1700-1821 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2011. AncestryImage