Tim VanBenschoten
The family

Family · the lines · Huntley

The Cooper of Lyme

the Huntley line, from a barrel-maker on the Sound

Before the name was a middle name, it was a man with an adze and a shipment of dried fish bound for Barbados. The Huntleys reach the deepest of the family's New England lines — to a cooper who came over by 1647, helped riot over a town boundary, and seeded a line that drifted from the Connecticut shore across New York and, two centuries on, married quietly into the Reeds.

c.1624Gen I · the British Isles → Lyme, CT · 41.32°N 72.33°W

John Huntley

cooper · fish-trader to Barbados

The immigrant. In Boston by 1647, shipping fish to Barbados; a cooper at Roxbury; granted seventy-one acres in the fourth division of Lyme in 1665. In 1672 he took part in the New London–Lyme boundary riot — a man willing to fight over a line on the ground. He died at Lyme in 1676, leaving six children and the root of the name.

1654Gen II · Boston → Lyme · 42.36°N 71.06°W

Aaron Huntley Sr.

second son of the immigrant

Born in Boston, baptised at Roxbury, he settled at Lyme like his father and raised eight children of his own. The family is rooted now on the Connecticut shore.

c.1690–1760Gen III–IV · Lyme, Connecticut

Daniel & James Huntley

two quiet generations

Father and son, carried by name in the printed Huntley lineage — Ira⁵, James⁴, Daniel³, Aaron², John¹ — their own pages still thin. The line holds at Lyme, waiting for the country to open westward.

c.1764Gen V · Duanesburg → Manlius, NY · 43.00°N 75.98°W

Ira Huntley

into New York

He carried the name out of New England — counted at Duanesburg in 1800, then buying Lot No. 54 at Manlius from Luther Bingham. He died there in 1814, the first of the line in the country west of the Hudson.

c.1794Gen VI · Manlius & Lenox, NY · 43.06°N 75.74°W

James W. Huntley

soldier of 1812 · a man of two homes

A War of 1812 soldier who lived, late in life, between two houses — his second wife's at Manlius and his married daughter's at Lenox, alternating across the censuses in a way that once fooled the genealogists into seeing two men. He drew his pension into 1885 and is buried in the Oneida Valley beside the Reeds.

1820Gen VII · Manlius → Lenox · 43.06°N 75.74°W

Henrietta Huntley

— and the rivers meet

Daughter of James W. Huntley and Nancy Dayharsh, she married Edmund M. Reed — the marriage that folds the Huntleys into the Reeds, and gives a grandson, a generation on, the name he carried all his life: James Huntley Reed.

1850–1980Gen VIII · the Oneida Valley · 43.08°N 75.66°W

The Reed century

the name rides on as inheritance

From Henrietta the line runs down through the Reeds of the Oneida Valley — Daniel Constable Reed, James Huntley Reed, Dorothy Reed, then Sally Kirkland — and so to Tim's mother. The cooper's name survives not as a surname but as a christening, handed down for the memory of the river it came from.

nowGen IX · the keeper of the line

Timothy VanBenschoten

— and then you

Who untangled the one man from the two, and traced the barrel-maker's line from a 1672 boundary riot down to a middle name still carried in the family.

From an adze and a barrel of fish to a name handed down — the longest New England reach in the tree.

IX generations  ·  the Connecticut shore to Central New York  ·  1624 → now

Drawn from the Huntley genealogy (1978), the NEHGR, parish and census records, and the family archive. Two of the early generations are carried by lineage string; their own records await.

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