RLP 356: Clarinda and Jerusha – Puritan Roots to Pioneer Legacy

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro, episode 356 Clarinda and Jerusha- Puritan Roots to Pioneer Legacy.

Nicole (41s):
Welcome to Research Like a Pro a Genealogy Podcast about taking your research to the next level, hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at FamilyLocket.com and the authors of Research Like a Pro A Genealogist Guide. With Robin Wirthlin they also co-authored the companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA. Join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases. Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (49s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (52s):
I am doing great. I have been working on organizing my first Institute course that I’m coordinating and it’s been fun.

Diana (1m 3s):
Well, yay. Can you tell us about it?

Nicole (1m 5s):
So it’s about integrating artificial intelligence into genealogical research and writing. And so I’ve just been working on making my handouts for each lecture and just getting syllabus materials ready. And so it’s been fun. Every time I have another AI handout or lecture to work on, I have to learn all the new things that have happened in the last month or so and, and so I’ve been reviewing kind of some of the new things with the release of the new version of ChatGPT o3 and o4. They are really advanced and so I’ve been playing with that a little bit.

Nicole (1m 47s):
They’re supposed to be more agentic, meaning they can act as agents and you can give it a task and it’ll go off and work on it. So I’ve been trying to play with that and thinking about advanced uses and simple uses. And I wonder if someday we’ll be able to give a research plan to an agentic model and say, here’s a research plan with links, follow the links, do the research, and then create a research log for me.

Diana (2m 13s):
Well, I wouldn’t put it past AI to have that down someday, but then I also wonder how good it will do and what will be the value of us not doing the work. Because I think I need to see the record myself. I need to decide if it’s for my person. I mean, I just wonder how much intelligence it will have and how good it will be at contrasting, You know, similar records or people the same name correlating information. So there’s a lot of questions there.

Nicole (2m 45s):
Right. Those are some of the things I was thinking about too. And it reminds me now that we’re talking about it, of the hints that we get at Ancestry and Family Search where it’s kind of doing that for you and it gives you a list of records that might match that person. And that’s a use of AI that we’ve all been familiar with for the last five to 10 years, you know, and sometimes those hints are correct and sometimes they’re not. And so it’s interesting to go through those and analyze them and try to decide which ones match our ancestor.

Diana (3m 18s):
Right. Perhaps you know, where it would save time is if you’re having to browse, you know, a microfilm or a digitized film, something that’s not indexed, if it could actually do that for you. And then you could decide if the record was really correct or not. But then I always wonder, okay, how correct is it? Kinda like with full text search, you know, it goes out and finds a lot of things, but it also misses some things. So yeah, a lot of things to think about there.

Nicole (3m 46s):
Right. And of course we’re always going to have to decide if something is correctly matching our person. We can’t remove ourselves completely from the research process, but it is interesting to think about the tasks that we do as Genealogists and which ones could be sped up through having an assistant.

Diana (4m 7s):
Absolutely. So let’s do our announcements. We have our Research Like a Pro Webinar Series for 2025 coming up, and our next webinar will be Saturday, May 17th at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. The title is Avoiding Assumptions: Tracing a Family in 19th Century London. And this will be presented by Jessica Taylor Morgan, who is an accredited genealogist in England. So this will be a great case study. It will examine the challenges of English genealogical research by focusing on George White, who was born in 1863 and died in 1928 in London.

Diana (4m 55s):
Our case explores three main topics: the varying availability of historical records, the diverse occupations typical of the period, and the challenges presented by misleading records. So I’m looking forward to this. I have done some England research and some that centers in London, and it is a difficult locality. So Jessica will be giving us a lot of great tips for London research. Our next Research Like a Pro study group begins August 27th, 2025, and the registration starts May 21st at 10:00 AM Mountain time and ends on August 21st. We are looking forward to the Texas Institute of Genealogical Research, and this goes by the acronym TIGR, T-I-G-R.

Diana (5m 36s):
This is a virtual institute so we can all stay home and enjoy it from our homes. It’s held June 16th through the 20th, and Nicole’s course that she’s coordinating is titled Integrating AI into Genealogical Research and Writing. So you can go to the website, www.txsgs.org/TIGR-2025. So we hope you can go look at that and see if you would like to join us for that. The registration is ongoing and it does end on June 6th. So Nicole is the coordinator, instructors will be Alice Childs, myself, Mark Humphreys, Jan Joyce, Steve Little, Angela Packer McGee, Katherine Schober, and Mark Thompson.

Diana (6m 30s):
So we have a really fun lineup and I think what will be so great about this is we’ll get to see how all sorts of different researchers are using AI in in their genealogy in their writing. So we’re excited about that and hope that you’ll join us. If you’re interested for getting more information about what we’re doing for coupons on any of our products, be sure to join our newsletter. We are also looking forward to the National Genealogical Society Conference, and that will be held in Louisville, Kentucky, May 23rd through the 25th.

Nicole (7m 8s):
Thanks. Yeah, it’ll be fun to be there in Louisville, Kentucky. And then after that we’ll have the Texas Institute, which is virtual. So a lot of fun things happening in the end of the spring and in the summer. Well, today we’re talking about my ancestor Clarinda Knapp Allen and her cousin Jerusha Barden Smith. Back when I wrote a blog post about this in February, at church we were learning about Hiram Smith in our curriculum to learn about the doctrine in covenants and Section 10 was given to Hiram Smith who wanted to learn what he could do to help his brother, Joseph Smith Jr. So to learn more about Hiram Smith, I thought it would be interesting to see if any of my Ancestors were related to Hiram’s descendants, like maybe they married into the family, or what I wasn’t sure.

Nicole (7m 59s):
So I decided to kind of do some research on that. One thing I did know at the start of this is that Joseph Smith Jr. didn’t have very many descendants because so many of his children died in infancy. But I knew Hiram Smith had a lot of descendants and many of them went west to Utah. And so I thought maybe there was a chance of some relationship there. Joseph’s descendants didn’t go west, they stayed in the east and didn’t migrate to Utah. And part of that, I think, is that Emma, Joseph’s widow felt like she needed to take care of Joseph’s mother who wasn’t migrating, and also she wanted probably to stay near Joseph’s grave. So that was interesting. Well, I did find that several of my husband’s ancestors married into the Hiram Smith family and one of his Richards first cousins, five times removed, married Hiram’s granddaughter Emma Irene Walker.

Nicole (8m 45s):
Emma was the daughter of Lovina Smith, who was the daughter of Hiram Smith and Jerusha Barden. But for this post, I decided to write about one of my own Ancestors instead of my husband’s, and she was related to Hiram’s wife, Jerusha Barden. So my ancestor through my grandmother, Renee Hollingsworth Elder, is Clarinda Knapp, and she is the third great-grandmother of my grandma, Renee, and Clarinda and Jerusha Barden were fourth cousins making Jerusha my fourth cousin, seven times removed. So I wanted to learn more about this family a little bit.

Nicole (9m 26s):
The Knapps were early settlers of the Connecticut River colony, which would become the state of Connecticut.

Diana (9m 33s):
It’s so interesting to be able to talk about and research these really early Colonial Ancestors, especially up in New England where we don’t usually do much research. So it’s been so fun to follow your research in this. Well, let’s learn a little bit more about these Knapp ancestors. And as you said, Clarinda Knapp and Jerusha Barden are both third great-granddaughters of Caleb Knapp and Hannah Smith. So Caleb was born 1636 or 37 in Watertown, Massachusetts Bay Colony, and his father was Nicholas Knapp, who came to Watertown, Massachusetts in 1630, probably with John Winthrop.

Diana (10m 15s):
And so listeners, you may recognize John Winthrop’s name. He was an English puritan lawyer and leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and this was the second major settlement after Plymouth Colony. Nicholas moved to Stanford, Connecticut in 1648 and the Connecticut River colony was organized on March 3rd, 1636 for the followers of Thomas Hooker’s Puritan congregation from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Nicholas arrived there later after the original followers of Hooker had already been there for several years.

Diana (10m 55s):
Nicholas Knapp wrote his will in 1670 in Stanford, Fairfield, Connecticut, and he gave his son Caleb the land by the mill he owned in Stanford. And Caleb had married Hannah Smith about 1660. They also lived in Stanford where Caleb wrote his will on October 11th, 1674. He named six children, including both Clarinda’s, second great-grandfather, John Knapp and Jerusha’s second great-grandfather, Samuel Knapp. So a lot of that information comes from FamilySearch Memories and histories, and that is such a good source for learning about these early Ancestors to get you started.

Diana (11m 39s):
You know, of course we wanna go find original sources eventually, but it’s nice to have those Memories that get us going on the actual people and the stories and just learning a little bit about these Ancestors. So these are authored sources, and another authored source was the Compendium of American Genealogy, and these have this Knapp genealogy, but as always with our authored sources, sometimes the parent-child links in different generations are not as solid as others. And so it’s always good to really go through, take a look and see what are the original records, what is the evidence for connecting these parent-child links?

Nicole (12m 23s):
Right, yeah, I think these are really interesting, these first Families of America type of books. This one was from the Compendium of American Genealogy, and it’s neat to see, you know, these descending genealogies there that include some of our really early Colonial ancestors, but at the same time, they don’t always include sources. And this particular one was pretty sparse, pretty bare, it just kind of had names of people and some dates had some occupations, some places. So you can tell, obviously there were sources used, but they’re not necessarily cited in the compendium.

Diana (13m 1s):
And we wish they were, right?

Nicole (13m 2s):
Which would be great.

Diana (13m 5s):
It would be great. And I always love it when there actually are sources or something to kind of guide you to something, at least a note that this was from a will or a land record. But if there’s nothing, then we have to go do the research.

Nicole (13m 18s):
Yes. And in FamilySearch, I’ve noticed that a lot of these early sources are not attached. You’ll see a lot of authored sources attached or scanned and uploaded as a Memory, but the original sources are sometimes really sparse for these early Colonial ancestors, and they would make such a great research project to gather the original sources and attach them.

Diana (13m 40s):
That’s a great idea.

Nicole (13m 43s):
Well, John Knapp, the ancestor that my line is through Clarinda Knapp Allen stayed in Stanford where he died in 1749 and was buried in the Stanford burying ground. Then John’s son, Moses was the next generation down, and he moved to another town in Fairfield County called Danbury, and that’s where his estate was probated in 1739. His will mentioned his son Moses Knapp Jr. And Moses Knapp Jr. And Margaret were the parents of Calvin Knapp, who was born in 1770 in Salisbury, Litchfield, Connecticut. And then Calvin was Clarinda’s father. So you can kind of see that mostly the sources linking these parents to their children are their wills or estates, probate records.

Nicole (14m 29s):
Also, some of the information documenting birth and death dates comes from Find a Grave, and often you will find really good memorials and pictures of headstones from early colonial times in New England. Another source that I also used for connecting Clarinda to her parents was an authored source called Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude that was published by the International Society of Daughters of Utah Pioneers. And I’ve used that book several times. There’s a lot of volumes of it, and they have often pictures of the women in there and information about their parentage and their spouses and children.

Nicole (15m 9s):
So it’s a great source for kind of getting started.

Diana (15m 13s):
Oh, that’s great. Let’s keep going with this descendancy here of the Knapps, and let’s go to Jerusha Barden’s line from Caleb Knapp. So Samuel Knapp, the ancestor of this line move from Stanford to Danbury, Connecticut, and he died there in 1739, and his son, John Bushnell Knapp, was born in 1700 in Danbury, Fairfield, Connecticut. And he was the father of Ruth Taylor Knapp, who was born May, 1745, also in Danbury. And this is one of those relationships that could use some more research to document it.

Diana (15m 54s):
And again, this one is just on FamilySearch, and we always wonder exactly what, what sources leading us to that connection. Well, Ruth married Seth Barden in 1763 in Danbury, and they were the parents of Seth Barden Jr. who was the father of Jerusha Barden. And she was born in Norfolk, Litchfield County, Connecticut. But by 1820 her family had moved to Greene, Chenango County, New York, and there she married Hiram Smith on November 2nd, 1826 in Manchester, Ontario County, New York.

Diana (16m 34s):
Interestingly, we have got some fun sources here. We’ve got Find a Grave again as we had earlier in the FamilySearch family tree, but also some sources from the Joseph Smith papers and then the 1820 Census of Chenango County, New York. So a little bit as we’re coming forward in time, getting a few more sources there that we recognize like the Census,

Nicole (17m 3s):
Right? Yes. And the biography for Jerusha Barden Smith on the Joseph Smith Papers website actually cited Lucy Mac Smith’s history that she wrote in 1845. So that was interesting to see that connection there, that Jerusha’s mother-in-law was mentioning her in her history.

Diana (17m 21s):
Yeah, that’s great. You know, that is just a call out to those histories where you just never know what you’re going to find, and when you’re researching someone different, you’re looking for something different. And so we can use that same history for so many different types of projects because there’s a lot of different people mentioned, and it’s that way with all of our ancestors, you know, they had a whole group of associates, and depending on who we’re researching, we might be able to go find a little bit about a specific person that we had just passed over when we initially read that history.

Nicole (17m 54s):
So true. Yeah, those perspectives changed depending on our research question.

Diana (17m 58s):
Right

Nicole (17m 59s):
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Nicole (18m 40s):
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Diana (18m 52s):
All right, thank you. Well, we’ve been talking about Jerusha Barden, but now we’re going to go over and talk about her cousin Clarinda Knapp Allen and Clarinda was born August 10th, 1802 in Bethlehem, Litchfield, Connecticut, and she was the daughter of Calvin Knapp and Deborah Hawkins. Clarinda was a school teacher when she married Andrew Lee Allen on 11 December, 1824 in Burton, and now called Allegheny, in Cattaraugus County, New York. Andrew Lee Allen, her husband, was baptized into the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1833.

Diana (19m 33s):
But Clarinda didn’t get baptized until 1836 after they moved to Kirtland, Ohio. And she and her 10-year-old son, Elijah Allen, were baptized on the same day by Elder Roger Orden, possibly in the Chagrin River, and confirmed by Sidney Rigdon first counselor in the first presidency in the new Kirtland Temple. The exact baptism date is unknown, but the temple was dedicated on March 27th, 1836, and it’s possible that Clarinda and her husband may have attended the dedication ceremony. So some sources there were the Elijah Allen Family Chronicles, you know, another authored source with some great information.

Diana (20m 17s):
We learned that Clarinda had 10 children in all, and she gave birth to her last child in 1844 in Plymouth, Hancock County, Illinois. And they had moved there to be closer to Nauvoo. The Carthage jail where Joseph and Hiram Smith were killed on June 27th, 1844 was only 10 miles north of Plymouth, Illinois. The Allen family moved to Nauvoo, Illinois where Clarinda and Andrew received their endowment in the Nauvoo Temple, and then they crossed the plains and arrived in Salt Lake City in 1852, settling in Provo. Several of her children settled in San Bernardino, California.

Diana (20m 58s):
So Clarinda joined them in 1855 while her husband Andrew stayed behind in Provo. And in 1862 she returned to Utah to see her relatives and died there in 1862. So that is so interesting that she went off to California for a while and then came back to Utah. And we have seen that with other ancestors where the husbands and wives, for whatever reason, one leaves and the other one doesn’t want to. And so they just kind of go off and do their own thing. So interesting.

Nicole (21m 29s):
Right? Yeah. With another family that I researched before this one, the same thing happened where some of them went to California. So I always wonder like, did they stop in Utah and then go to California, or they just go straight to California? So it was definitely a hot location in that time period with the Gold Rush and things and hearing about how beautiful it was there. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some people went to Utah and decided, I don’t like this. I’m going on to California.

Diana (21m 59s):
Especially if they were sending letters back about this wonderful ocean and the beaches and the mild temperature, you know, depending on where you were living. So it would be hard not to go live there if you’re living through a Utah winter and you are tired of the cold. Right. I would be tired.

Nicole (22m 17s):
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s interesting to hear about Clarinda, how she went to go visit her children in San Bernardino, then returned back to Utah where she passed away. Well, now let’s talk about Clarinda’s cousin Jerusha Barden Smith. So we know they both descend from those early Knapp ancestors, but what happened during her own life? Well, she was Hiram Smith’s wife when Hiram’s younger brother, Joseph Smith Jr, began translating the Book of Mormon in 1828 and beginning the religious movement that would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1830.

Nicole (23m 0s):
Jerusha was baptized into the new church by David Whitmer about June 9th, 1830 in Seneca Lake, New York. Jerusha had six children all from 1827 to 1837, and sadly, she died on October 13th, 1837, soon after her last child was born. It’s pretty sad because when she died, her husband Hiram was gone serving a mission, and some of her last words were to tell her children to tell their father that the Lord had taken their mother and left them for him to take care of. And Hiram was very grieved at her passing and at his brother, Joseph’s encouragement, he got married soon after to Mary Fielding for the sake of the children.

Nicole (23m 48s):
And in 1848, Mary Fielding Smith brought Jerusha surviving three children and her own two children, which were born in 1838 and 41 across the plains to Utah. So it was sad to learn about Jerusha passing away after childbirth, but encouraging that Hiram’s new wife was able to take care of the children.

Diana (24m 10s):
Oh, that is so interesting because I have heard many stories about Mary Fielding Smith and you know, she brought those children across the plains after Hiram was martyred, he was murdered with Joseph Smith, and so she was left a widow with these children. And so Mary was told by the leader of the company that she shouldn’t come because she was a single woman and she would never make it. And she said, I will beat you all to Salt Lake. And she did. She, there’s some really fun stories about her. So she was, she was a strong woman. So that’s really neat to learn about Jerusha, who was the first wife and how Mary took on Jerusha’s children and you know, was their mother.

Diana (24m 58s):
So it’s always so fascinating to hear the backstory of these people. Well, as we kind of wrap this up, these Knapp descendants all found the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the 1830s, so very early, and were baptized and they descended from Puritan ancestors who were early settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And Clarinda and Jerusha, these cousins, followed a very common migration path from Connecticut to New York. And then from there they moved with the church to Kirkland, Ohio where Jerusha died. And then their descendants, both Jerusha’s and Clarinda’s, all, all moved west to Utah.

Diana (25m 39s):
So, so fascinating to see that progression from the early 1600s there on the east coast of Massachusetts, then all the way out to Utah for these descendants. Well, after this project, you had a lot of ideas for what else you needed to research, and there were some lines to, to really document like the line from Caleb Knapp to Jerusha Barden and finding a source for several parent-child relationships and then to review more biographies of Jerusha. So I think it’s really great to have those, you know, detailed out because honestly, every single one of those could be a full on project.

Diana (26m 22s):
You know, we’re working back far in time and trying to find specific records or indirect sources that would really cement those relationships. So that’s neat to see the relationships there between these women and our ancestor. Well, my mother-in-law, your grandma, so that’s neat. Good job on that research.

Nicole (26m 44s):
Well, it is fun, like you said, to try out a new locality and just learn about what sources are already being used to document our ancestors in New England. We haven’t spent a lot of time looking at our New England ancestors because some of them are really well documented. So it’s been a fun learning opportunity to just really dive into these New England localities and sources.

Diana (27m 8s):
Yeah, I find it really fascinating to see this theme of religion going through it too, because the Puritans left England so they could practice their religion. And then, you know, this time period, there’s just a lot of differences in religions and I’d be so curious to know what church these nap descendants were from before they joined the LDS church. You know, I’m guessing they probably weren’t still practicing puritans. What was their religious belief? It’d be interesting to see the progression there as well. So many aspects to this research.

Nicole (27m 45s):
Right? Yeah, we talked about some of the other people in this series I’ve been writing about were congregational members, and then of course there were the Baptist and the Methodists that were popular at that time and place. So yeah, I should look into that. It would be interesting you could add that to my list of future research on the naps,

Diana (28m 1s):
Just kind of a theme that’s going through their lives. It’d be fun to find out.

Nicole (28m 6s):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening and we hope you’ll continue to research your Ancestors and learn more about their lives and their migrations and their relatives, their family groups that migrated together in similar patterns and had connections in religion and and all those kinds of things. So good luck in your research and we will talk to you again next week.

Diana (28m 25s):
All right. Bye-bye.

Nicole (28m 27s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DNA on Amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday, subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket.com/newsletter. Please subscribe, rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.