Who Was Samuel Charles Tidd? Part II

In 2022 I went on a hunt for a link between my direct ancestor Samuel Charles Tidd of Georgetown and his supposed parents from Woburn, Samuel and Ruhamah Richardson Tidd. That effort, which ended in absolute failure, is summarized here.

I finally found what I was looking for thanks to Pliny Tidd, who died in Concord New Hampshire on September 7^th, 1887. Here’s that story. . .

Pliny Tidd’s Manuscript

The uncommon name “Pliny” can be traced to Roman antiquity, where a man named Pliny the Younger reported (to Roman historian Tacitus) details of the volcanic eruption at Mount Vesuvius. The man’s uncle, Pliny the Elder, died from exposure to sulfur and ash.

How many other men have carried the name Pliny since? Not many, I’d wager, but Deacon Samuel & wife Mary Tidd of Woburn Massachusetts saw fit to bestow the name upon their youngest son born in 1826 (many years after his siblings). Perhaps they hoped Pliny would grow to be a man of great education, pursuing law or playing an active role in the local ministry like his father.

Instead, Pliny grew to become a blacksmith, a respected member of the Odd Fellows fraternal organization, and in his later years a genealogy buff. He spent a great deal of time collecting information about the Tidds of Woburn, compiling his knowledge into a manuscript left among his possessions when he died.

Pliny’s son Charles happened to know a historian named Edward F. Johnson, who at the time had undertaken the considerable task of publishing historical records of Woburn, his hometown. In 1890, Johnson published a compilation of births, deaths, and marriages in Woburn from 1640 through 1853. Since many Tidds lived in Woburn during those years, a town founded by immigrant John Tidd among others, Edward Johnson immediately seized on the opportunity to borrow Pliny’s manuscript for his book.

Edward P Johnson’s Typescript

Building on Pliny’s work and records found elsewhere, Edward Johnson eventually produced a 50-page manuscript of his own entitled “The Story of the Tidd Family of Woburn, Massachusetts 1625-1915”. (Who wouldn’t want to read that gem!)

The subtext states Johnson did the work in 1890, and it contains little if anything about the Tidds living between 1890 and 1915, though he may have worked on it during that time. Johnson never finished his manuscript, which sat in his drawer until long after his death in 1922.

Finally, in 1934, Johnson’s son Harold supplied a copy to 60-year-old Arthur W. Tidd of White Plains, New York. Why he chose Arthur is unclear; Arthur and Pliny were distant cousins who probably never met, but Arthur had been born in Woburn, the son of Samuel Hitchcock Tidd and his wife Lucretia, so perhaps Harold knew him.

Arthur promptly turned around and gave a copy of the Tidd manuscript (technically a typescript, since a typewriter was used) to the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. The stamp on that copy is September 1, 1954.

I imagine few touched it since then, but in October 2023 I found a reference to the paper online and wrote to NEHGS to request a copy. They were closed for renovations, but a nice woman named Judy Lucey dusted off the old papers and promptly sent me a PDF. So exciting!

What Pliny and Edward Said About Samuel Charles Tidd

Pliny and Edward’s work has errors, starting off with the wrong John Tidd immigrant, but also two references to our direct ancestor Samuel Charles Tidd of Georgetown that appear accurate (in that they are all I have).

The first is a 1786 note about Ruhamah returning from Jaffrey, NH to Woburn with son Samuel and daughter Hannah to visit her mother. This infant Samuel was probably the Samuel Charles Tidd who settled in Georgetown and left a tombstone with a birth year of 1784. Ruhamah was “warned out of town”, a custom to ensure she knew that, now that she lived in Jaffrey, the town of Woburn would not support her should she become indigent. Since Jaffrey NH kept no town meeting records from that time, and the first Jaffrey tombstone did not appear until 1820 or so, most of what became of Samuel and Ruhamah is unrecorded. No “Samuel Tidd” appears in 1790 census records for Jaffrey, or anywhere else I’ve looked in New England (that wasn’t a different Samuel Tidd). Something might still turn up, but it’s not clear what that could be.

Pliny and Edward’s second note is about another of Samuel and Ruhamah’s sons, “Samuel B. Tidd”, who lived to Woburn as an adult. The note says Samuel B. had “brothers, etc who lived in Georgetown”. This, too, appears to be a reference to our ancestor Samuel Charles Tidd. Makes me wonder if he had siblings living with him on the Tidd farm in Georgetown. Something else to investigate.

All those open questions aside, it seems Aunt Clara’s genealogy charts had it right. We descend from Samuel and Ruhamah Tidd of Woburn, and from further up the Tidd line: Lt. Jonathan Tidd; Ebenezer Tidd; John Tidd; John Tidd, an original proprietor of Lexington Mass; and John Tidd the immigrant, a founder of Woburn Mass.