Divided Again

On the twenty-eighth of August, 1813, Captain Nesbitt Collver of Townsend township made his will — two lots, six children, three strips cut crosswise for three boys. A fortnight later he was dead in the King’s service, the family’s only uniformed death of the War of 1812. His will survives because his widow Sarah carried it to the county registry, where it became memorial No. 775 — and the registered copy quietly corrects the family’s own memory, which had dropped one of his sons entirely.

The war had already cut the other way: in July 1812 an ensign of the same family rode house to house urging Norfolk’s militia not to march, then deserted to the Americans and forfeited his farm — the captain’s own nephew, as the family record has it. A generation after 1776 divided the house for the Crown, 1812 divided it again at the scale of Sunday dinner: a grave in the King’s service and a farm forfeited for the enemy’s, one township, one regiment, one surname.

And what did family memory do with the pair? It misplaced the deserter and promoted the captain into the wrong war — “an officer in the British Army during the Revolutionary War,” which ended when he was nine. Memory is loyal before it is accurate. The register kept both men without comment.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.