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S01:E18
Frances Manwaring Caulkins is the historian every family in southeastern Connecticut stands on — and the only reason we can put a name to the woman the New London court sentenced to fifteen stripes in 1719.
A reader's passing remark sent us looking for whether her family and the Collvers ever touched. What turned up instead was this: writing in 1904, John Bolles answered a minister who had sneered that the Rogerenes' descendants were "almost unknown" by naming the town's most distinguished people of Rogers blood — and he began with Caulkins.
The records bear him out at every link. Elizabeth Rogers, daughter of James, born at New London in 1749 and living at Hog Neck when she married Robert Manwaring in October of 1772; their children Christopher and Fanny, baptized together in September of 1787; Fanny married to Joshua Caulkins in 1792; and Frances born in 1795, the year her father died.
The historian was of the sect's own stock — and she leaned the other way while she wrote about them. Bolles calls her gifted and honored and the first to search that ground seriously, and in the same breath notes she was "inclined to favor the ecclesiastical side."
Two things are left open on purpose: which James Rogers, and whether the descent runs on her father's side too.
Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.