NHA Home - Historic Nantucket Articles

Susan Mitchell: A Woman of Many Identities

by Jim Sulzer

UNTIL MY QUEST FOR SUSAN MITCHELL GOT under way, I had no idea how much skill, persistence, good judgment, imagination, and sometimes luck are involved in even the simplest act of historical research. This woman of many identities taught me that a real historian accomplishes an almost miraculous feat, like someone constructing a tiny but perfect replica of a ship inside a bottle, while following faded, misleading, shredded instructions. With her multiple identities and her conflicting stories, Susan Mitchell taught me that researching isn't easy for amateurs like myself, but the rewards of the chase can be keen and exhilarating.

It was the summer of 2000, and I was repaying a favor to the incomparable Tom Congdon, who had edited a book of mine that was about to be published. A few years earlier, in exchange for his efforts to salvage another manuscript, I had shingled the front of his Pine Street house; for this latest piece of editing, his charge to me was to delve beneath the fagade and research the history of the house, which he owns with his wife, Connie.

As the search began, I had no idea that someone named Susan Mitchell would enter the story, or how many difficulties I would encounter even before she arrived on the scene.

My guide to researching the history of a house was Hobson Woodward's 1997 article in Nantucket Magazine, "If These Walls Could Talk." From his clear, helpful explanations I learned about constructing a "deed chain" by examining the current deed and following its reference to the previous deed, which in turn should refer to a still older deed—on and on into the mists of Nantucket history.

For a while, as I began to trace the history of Tom and Connie's house, the records in the Registry of
Deeds in a corner of the town building were essential. As I paged my way through the thick, hardbound books of records, I found that the current deed referred directly to a 1979 purchase from the former owner, which referenced a 1977 purchase from yet another owner. I started to feel more comfortable with the terminology: "grantor" meant seller and "grantee" meant buyer, and I anticipated an easy conclusion to the search as I leapfrogged from deed to deed back into the 1800s and earlier.

In retrospect, it should come as no surprise that even before I reached the mid 1900s, the chain grew tangled. The 1977 deed referred to the granting of one-third of the property in 1946 to a husband and wife, Wilhelm Mathison and Louise E. Mathison, from someone named Grover C. Coffin, identified as the son of Martha W. (Chadwick) Coffin—and at that point the linear chain of leads dissolved into a series of circuitous ambiguities.

As Hobson Woodward's article explains, once the deeds stop offering clues, it is likely that the earlier transferences were made through inheritance. At that point it is necessary to go upstairs to the state's Probate Court, which has records of the disposition of property through wills.

Before researching the probate records, however. I needed to decide exactly what I was researching. I needed to form a hypothesis or hypotheses—to make best guesses, and then check those guesses against later findings. In forming those hypotheses, I had nothing but common sense as my guide. I posed a few central questions: why was one third of the property granted to this husband and wife team? Had the property already been split into thirds—and why?

To begin to answer those questions, I needed to learn more about William and Louise E. Mathison. While there was little on William, in the town clerk's office I did find the death certificate of Louise E. (Chadwick) Mathison, which revealed the names of her parents, Frederick S. Chadwick and Mary L. Folger.

In turn, an 1874 probate court record of F. S. Chadwick revealed that guardianship of young Frederick had passed to his mother, Eliza Chadwick, in that year, possibly with the death of his father—Eliza being the grandmother of Louise E. Mathison. With this further clue, I then examined the probate file of Eliza Chadwick in the year of her death, 1903. It revealed three children: the previously identified Frederick as well as his sisters, Martha W. (Chadwick) Coffin and Sarah E. (Chadwick) Jones. The three siblings were the father and the two aunts of Louise E. Mathison.

Here was the first possible clue: perhaps the one-third share was the aftereffect of the house having been jointly owned by three siblings. As further corrobora-tion, Grover C. Coffin was the son of one of the siblings—of the oldest, Martha W. (Chadwick) Coffin—and in 1946 Grover would, in fact, transfer his one-third of the property to his cousin, Louise E. Mathison. With that action, the daughter of Frederick Chadwick received a one-third share from the son of Martha, effectively reuniting the ownership of the house in a single branch of the family, one generation removed from the original three siblings.

But how had the original three siblings come to own the house? Perhaps, I hypothesized, Eliza Chadwick had owned the house and passed it on to her three children.

Wrong. An examination of property transfers from 1900 to 1910 revealed no such transfer. Eliza had apparently never owned the property.

I knew I needed to prove their ownership, but I had exhausted all the resources I knew: deed chain, death certificates, probate records.

When a dog loses a bone or a tennis ball, it begins a random search in the most likely areas, trusting to chance and luck, and I could think of no better approach. I began a feverish search of all property transfers on Nantucket in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and dumb luck finally came to my res-cue. An examination in 1911 found a transfer in March of two-thirds of the property from Frederick S. Chadwick and Mary F. Chadwick to Emma Cook—and then, oddly, five days III later, from Emma Cook back to Mary F. Chadwick alone. Apparently, that was a legal maneuver to give sole ownership to Mary Chadwick, who would later bequeath that two-thirds share to her daughter, Louise E. Mathison, in a now-missing probate transfer. Why the 1911 transfer to Emma Cook and back to Mary F. Chadwick? I could only conjecture that Frederick was in some sort of legal trouble and needed to transfer sole ownership of his two-thirds of the property to his wife. But whatever the reason, this record was proof that as of 1911, Frederick and Mary were already in possession of two-thirds of the house—suggesting further that Frederick had already received the one-third interest of his younger sister, Sarah E. (Chadwick) Jones.

Here was a new hypothesis: Frederick has slowly been gathering up the missing thirds of the property for his own use.

A return to the Registry of Deeds would reveal exactly such a transfer. A search of the grantee books revealed that in January of 1911, Sarah E. (Chadwick) Jones transferred her one-third ownership of the property to her brother Frederick. And even better, for the purposes of my search, this record referenced an earlier transfer: on December 19, 1874, the property had been sold for $550 to Martha, Frederick, and Sarah Chadwick, all of them in their teens, by someone named Susan Mitchell.

There was no record of how Susan Mitchell came into the property, or why she would sell it to three teenagers. And this mysterious woman would prove much more difficult to trace than the legal machinations encountered thus far.

Who was Susan Mitchell? The death records for Nantucket gave evidence of two who lived in the nineteenth century: Susan R. Mitchell and Susan A. Mitchell. My working hypothesis now was to find as much as I could about each of them and, with luck, to come across the record of how one of them came to own the property.

Susan R. Mitchell was born a Hallett. She didn't marry Joseph Mitchell until 1880 (when she was forty-seven and he was seventy) and therefore couldn't be the Susan Mitchell who sold the property to the three Chadwick siblings in 1874.

Susan A. Mitchell was born a Chase, the daughter of Reuben Chase and Judith (Gardner) Chase. She was born in 1791 and died in 1875. Marriage records in the town clerk's office revealed that in 1811, at the age of twenty, she married Obed Alley of Nantucket. He died on November 5, 1836, leaving her some property on Pearl Street (later to be renamed India Street). In 1846 her father died intestate—leaving it to his son, Reuben Chase II, to administer his estate—and with no clear records of property disbursal. In 1848 Susan married a second huband, Samuel Mitchell—the same probate judge who oversaw the intestate administration of her father's estate! He died in 1866. A court document revealed that he owned property on North Water Street and granted her permission to live on the property for the remainder of her life, but leaving it after her death to his children by a previous marriage. Perhaps, I reasoned, she had inherited the Pine Street property from her husband or her father. It seemed possible that she viewed the Pine Street property as a "second home" and felt at liberty to sell it in 1874 to help support her in her declining years. It was possible, but not proven.

Another court record showed that Susan A. Mitchell was declared insane on April 20, 1875, and put in the custody of Obed Chase. She died in Brockton, and an appraisal of her property revealed a house and grounds on Pearl Street worth $850, as well as bonds and cash worth over $1,000. There was no mention of any property on Pine Street.

Since Susan Mitchell was listed as the sole owner of the property sold to the Chadwicks, it was tempting to think that she purchased the property as a widow in the period between the death of her second husband in 1866 and the selling of the property to the Chadwicks in 1874. However, a close examination of the grantee records during that time period revealed no such purchase. At that point, emulating a dog searching in wider and wider circles, I examined the grantee records all the way back to 1836, and found no records of the Pine Street property being sold to anyone. When this search proved fruitless, I then researched the death records of Reuben Chase, identifying his father Stephen and his mother Judith, looking desperately for mentions in their probates of Pine Street. Nothing. I even checked the records of the Alleys—her family from her first marriage. Again, nothing. My random, dogged approach had worked earlier, but now it failed.

No one in the family of Susan A. Mitchell had ever owned property on Pine Street. She was the wrong Susan Mitchell.

The problem was, no other Susan Mitchells appeared in the town death records.

There was one other recourse—to look through the tax records, available at the Assessor's Office. Fortunately, the town tax records go back to 1871—just far enough to be useful for this search. They were on microfiche and had to be viewed on a rusty old machine outside the Assessor's Office that looked as if it hadn't been used in years. Merely finding toner for the printer was an effort—but with a bit of tweaking the machine kicked into working order and even coughed out some barely legible copies of the old microfiche. The trouble was worth it. Eventually those tax records would furnish crucial clues to the identity of Susan Mitchell.

In 1871, 1872, and 1873 the tax records noted Susan Mitchell's payment of taxes on the property on North Water Street which she had inherited (temporarily) from Samuel Mitchell. The house was valued at $300, the land at $100, and the total combined tax was $16.96.

Then, in 1874, came an astonishing development: Susan Mitchell's name came up again, but now in connection with a Pine Street property. I was so excited that I jotted down at the bottom of the printout a short note: "first mention of Pine Street—no mention of N. Water Street." If I had been less exhilarated, I might have noticed a yet more revealing development: the North Water Street property did still appear—after the amended name Susan A. Mitchell. The Susan Mitchell of Pine Street was another person altogether—a yet unsuspected person whose death certificate has apparently been lost.

Still not realizing that there were actually two Susan Mitchells in 1874, I nevertheless stumbled upon the decision that would eventually solve the mystery of the ownership of the Pine Street property. Having heard over the years that the Nantucket Historical Association had an archive full of details on many Nantucket properties, I concluded that I now had enough information to conduct a search there.

At the NHA Research Library (in the old building), research associate Libby Oldham listened to my mus-ings on the Mitchell family and Pine Street and then, with nothing more than a short step-ladder and a wealth of knowledge and discernment, she effortlessly and efficiently furnished the missing clue. Looking up the Mitchell family, she found that folder 15 in the Mitchell family papers contained something about "Susan Mitchell . . . 1866 . . . sale of Ray's Court Property." Since Ray's Court backs up on Pine Street, it was possible that this new lead related to the Pine Street property in some way.

I began to look through the file with a mixture of reverence and eagerness. Among many pieces of miscellaneous information about Edward Mitchell in folder 15, there surfaced a deed of sale granting him ownership of a piece of land. The seller was Susan Mitchell. And in claiming her right to the property, she noted: "By virtue of the power, liberty and authority given to me by the last will and testament of my mother, Alice Barnard."

It was a different Susan Mitchell, after all— a Barnard, not a Chase.

The deed of sale contained a plot plan showing that the property Susan sold to Edward for forty dollars was the piece of property east of the Congdon home. Showing . signs of a recent, meticulous survey, the plot plan also indicated Susan Mitchell's land and even showed the location of the northeast corner of Susan Mitchell's porch— part of the house now owned by the Congdons. That porch was about twenty feet from the back of the property, and later measurements would confirm that it had subsequently been converted into the present-day kitchen at the rear of the Congdon house.

The search was finally back on track. There was a new Susan Mitchell, complete with a new family. Further research would reveal that the property came to her through her father, Thomas Barnard, who died at sea in 1808 and left the property to his widow, Alice. Alice's will in 1843 stated, "To my daughter Susan Mitchell I give and bequeath the dwelling house in which I now live, with all the land and outbuildings thereto belonging." Thomas had received the land and house from his father, Shubael Barnard, who had probably received the property from his father Matthew Barnard. The house may have been built by his father John Barnard, a grandson of Thomas Barnard, one of the original purchasers of Nantucket in 1659.

The general outline of the Congdon's house history was now complete. Many questions remained unanswered: Which Barnard actually built the Pine Street home? Why did the teen-aged Chadwick children purchase the home in 1874? What happened to Susan Mitchell after she sold the property to them? Why did Frederick Chadwick transfer sole ownership of two-thirds of the property to his wife?

With perseverance, good judgment, imagination, and not a little luck, someone with more skill than I may one day answer those questions.

Jim Sulzer is an elementary-school teacher, author, and member of the NHA's Editorial Committee. His oral history with George Andrews was published in the summer 2003 issue of Historic Nantucket.

Originally published in Historic Nantucket, Summer 2004 (Vol. 53, No. 3), p. 8-13.