Benjamin Mulford

  General Notes:

Benjamin Mulford m. (1) Sarah _____ , granddaughter of John Spinning, Sr.1700-1778 [gs 1515 1PC]. Sarah was buried 7/18/1781,according to 1PCSB, but her gravestone was not found by Wheeler & Halsey in 1892. I have no indication that she bore any children, but she might have died in childbirth and left a surviving infant, unknown to me.
It may not be germane to a study of Benjamin's descendants, but Sarah's identity is a nice puzzle. John Spinning's will (dated 2/4/1776 and proved 12/21/1793) named his children: John, Jonathan (dec'd.), Ebenezer, Daniel, Frances (wife of Joseph Watkins) and Phebe (wife of William Stites). Since John's will mentioned the deceased Jonathan, I think it can be assumed that the will would also have mentioned any other deceased children -- particularly if they had left any off spring of their own. So my presumption is that this is a complete list of John Spinning's children.
Sarah was married to Benjamin Mulford by 1781, so she was almost certainly born in or before 1765. Three of John Spinning's six children weren't married until after then, so they can be eliminated from consideration as Sarah's parents. A fourth, Frances (Spinning) Watkins, was married in 1761and had a daughter Sarah - but not until 1772. The last two, Ebenezer Spinning and Phebe (Spinning) Stites (m. 6/7/1761), are therefore the only possible parents of Sarah. Ebenezer had Anna b.1762, Abner b. 1764, Mary b. 1767, Jonathan b. 1776, and perhaps other children. William and Phebe Stites had Phebe Spinning Stites bap. 5/2/1762, William Stites bap.2/26/1764, John Stites bap. 1/19/1767, and Daniel Stites bap. 3/15/1772, all at St. John's Episcopal Church in Elizabeth - and perhaps other children. Phebe (Spinning) Stites (1736-1822) and some of her Stites relatives by marriage are buried in a plot adjoining the Spinning family's.Frances (Spinning) Watkins1730-1787 [gs 1519] is buried near her parents and beside her sister Phebe. Her husband Joseph Watkins' grave has not been found, nor have any Watkins children's. They may all have left Elizabeth.
Benjamin Mulford appears in the Jan. 1779 table of ratables for the Elizabeth Town Ward of Essex County as a single man available for hire, with no taxable property. In the Feb. 1780 list, he was no longer single and was a householder - so his marriage to Sarah occurred in 1779 or the first two months of 1780. Two children of Benjamin were buried at the 1stPres. Ch. in 1787 and 1788 [Sexton's Book]. One of them could have been Sarah's child, but not both, since she died so soon after her marriage. So it appears that Benjamin married again - perhaps his marriage to Patience - between late 1781 and, at the very latest, mid-1787. Benjamin's only child known to have been living in 1830, Lewis Mulford, was born in 1790.
I have no clues at all to Patience's identity. Church records show that a Patience Mulford joined the 1st Pres. Ch. of Elizabeth on11/17/1807. A month after Patience joined the church, Benjamin's son David was christened there - the only one of his children whose christening is noted in the IGI. David must have been several years old at the time, since Patience was then about 47. Perhaps Benjamin and Patience did not belong to any church before 1807.
Benjamin Mulford owned land in 1811 near that of Robert Clark, father ofAmos and grandfather of Job Clark, who married Charity B. Mulford in 1806 [see 1811 will of Robert Clark]. For several years I surmised that the geographic proximity of Benjamin's land to that of theClarks would eventually lead me to some indication that Charity was Benjamin's daughter, but nothing of the kind has appeared, and in the mean time other evidence has come to light making it almost certain that Charity was a daughter of Benjamin's brother John Mulford.
The graves of Benjamin and Patience Mulford are at the Ist Pres. Ch. in Elizabeth [gs 1290 and 1289]. He d. 7/27/1840 in his 89th year, "a Patriot of the Revolution." A birth date of 1751 or '52 is indicated by his stone. What was the source for the birth date given in the IGI?
Benjamin filed a Revolutionary War pension application 9/7/1830. The abstract of it in Rev. War Pension Records, vol. 2, p. 2448, reads as follows: " Mulford, Benjamin, S34446, (NJ) appl 7 Sep 1830 Essex Co. NJ, in 1828 sol's wife Patience was referred to & in 1830 sol had a wife aged 72, sol. d 29 Jul 1840 leaving children, but only as one Lewis who had a family of his own in 1830 and was Iiving in NYC was named; sol's bro Thomas Mulford was aged 80 in 1830 a res of Essex Co. NJ & his [Thomas's] son Jonathan Mulford was of Essex Co. NJ in 1810 & Jonathan Mulford had a son Benjamin W. Mulford who in 1830 was of Essex Co., NJ, in 1829 one Townly Mulford of Essex Co. NJ was mentioned but no relationship was given."
Thomas Mulford, who had son Jonathan and grandson Benjamin W. Mulford, was a son of Lewis Mulford of Elizabethtown (now Roselle), NJ. Therefore, Benjamin Mulford of the pension application, who had a son Lewis and wife Patience and who died and was buried at the First Presbyterian Church in July 1840, was also a son of Lewis. Townley Mulford was Benjamin's nephew (a son of John) and next-door neighbor at the time of the pension application.
The record of Benjamin's pension indicates that he served as a private in the Massachusetts line, oddly enough. The record is abstracted as follows on an Ancestry.com web page under the heading "Full Context of New Jersey Pensioners of 1835":

County: Essex Co.
Name: Benjamin Mulford
Rank: Private
Annual Allowance: 96 00
Sums Received: 319 16
Description of service: Massachusetts line
When placed on the pension roll: November 8, 1830
Commencement of pension: November 8, 1830
Age: 82 Laws under which inscribed, increased or reduced OR Remarks.: [left blank]
The mention of Benjamin's 72-year-old wife in 1830 is bewildering. Patience would then have been 72 - except that her gravestone inscription, as transcribed by Wheeler, tells us she had died and been buried three years earlier! Was Benjamin lying? Senile? Did someone else submit his application for him, with errors in it? Has the application been misread, mistranscribed, or misinterpreted? Did Wheeler misread Patience's gravestone?
In the federal census of 1830 Benjamin was living in ElizabethTownship in a household consisting of one man 70-80 (himself), one girl 5-10, one woman 30-40, and one woman 70-80. The identities of these three are puzzling. The middle-aged woman could be a daughter or daughter-in-law (unmarried orwidowed) or a housekeeper, and the girl her daughter, but I have no evidence with which to support these speculations. And if Patience died in 1827, who was the 70-to-80 year-old woman living in Benjamin's house in 1830? If Patience was living in 1830, who was buried in 1827? Could the death date taken by Wheeler & Halsey from Patience's stone be a mistranscription of 1837?
The 1840 census was apparently conducted in Benjamin's neighborhood after his death in late July of that year. He does not appear in it.
There was at least one other Benjamin Mulford in northern NewJersey, contemporaneous with this one, but I'm reasonably sure I haven't confused the two. The other was son of Jeremiah of Newark, and had a son Daniel by his wife Anna [will of Jeremiah; will of Daniel; birth rec. of Daniel to Benjamin & Anna in IGI]. If there were other north Jersey Benjamin Mulford's during this period, I have found no records of them. There were Benjamin Mulford's in south Jersey from 1700 on, but I've found nothing to indicate that the north and south Jersey Mulford's ever mingled, or have ever been confused by genealogists.

  Burial Notes:

Benjamin is buried in the First Presbyterain Churchyard in Elizabeth, Union County, New Jersey. His inscrption reads "Benjamin Mulford died Jul 27 1840 aged 89y, a Patriot of the Revolution".

Benjamin married Sarah before 4 Feb 1776 in , , New Jersey. (Sarah died on 18 Jul 1781-1783 in Drowned and was buried in Elizabeth, Essex, New Jersey.)

Benjamin next married Patience Miller about 1787. (Patience Miller was born in 1760-1761,¹ died on 28 Dec 1827 in , Essex, New Jersey ¹ and was buried in Dec 1827 in Elizabeth, Essex, New Jersey ¹.)