In 2019 a friend and I were on Interstate 64 on our way to Newport News when I noticed we were a short distance from the little community of New Kent. A quick search on google maps revealed that St. Peter's Episcopal Church was only a few miles away, past the New Kent Winery on the Old Church Road and then a right onto St. Peter's Lane. You go by the churchyard before you get to the Church itself.
My ancestor John Gaulding was here in 1707 because the christening of his daughter Anne is listed in the Vestry Book. I'm not sure where he came from because there are a number of possibilities, but sources are limited as New Kent is one of the 'burned counties' of Virginia. Trying to find Colonial records of any kind in New Kent is difficult and it's not because they never existed, but because the wholesale destruction of the Civil War and the act of an 18th century arsonist named John Price Posey along with several accomplices of his obliterated in one night of destruction a large percentage of the documents that were housed in the County Clerk's office. The fire they started destroyed it all in July of 1787. Fortunately our Colonial ancestors had the good sense to convict Posey and hang him. That didn't bring back the records though, so the complete story of John Gaulding and his family may never be fully told. I may have to content myself with trying to fill in the blanks with what I do know about him, gleaned from a multitude of sources yet still woefully incomplete.
We drove up to the entrance of the church and parked. A member was working in the flower beds so I went up to talk to her and ask her if they got many visitors who were there to inquire about their family history. She said most of the people of the area and families all over the country whose ancestors had been around for a long time could trace their ancestry to this church.
The Vestry Book of St. Peter's Parish contains information about the workings of the church, just people going about their daily business, their names frozen in time. In 1719 "Elizabeth Wicker hath this Day Agreed with this Vestry to keep George Baisy to the 18th Day of November next for four hundred and fifty pounds of Tobacco." From 1711 "Ordered that ye Church wardens Agree with Some Doctor to Cure Mary Wilde of her Ailement & if she think herself able to undergo a Course of Phiale, The Church wardens are to agree w'th ye Doctor for ye same." In 1703 they were building this brick church and there are entries in the Vestry Book such as "James Knott, plasterer, doeth and hath this day agreed with this vestry to drive and naile on the Lathes and doe all the Lathing, plastering and painting work that is to be done.."
It's mundane accounting and things of that nature. Occasionally there's a glimpse into the lives of the people who lived in the Parish at that time. Daniel Custis was a vestryman at St. Peter's Church and he met and married the 16 year old Martha Dandridge there. We see his name often, in alliance with the many other names that are on the headstones outside in the cemetery that surrounds the church. Custis died in 1757, many years after my ancestor John Gaulding and his family were gone and two years after his death his widow Martha married George Washington.
There's also this, in 1711. “To Captain Joseph FOSTER for 1 sheet delivered to JOHN GAWLIN to bury his daughter 9 in to be about 12/6 79”
From what I have been able to find out about John Gaulding and his wife Anne, I don't think they had easy lives. Of the seven children that are listed with them in the Vestry Book, I'm fairly sure five of them died young. If the story is true that they came to America from England it is possible that another son named John died there in 1668. That makes six children dead at an early age, and of the three surviving children, Alexander was executed in Williamsburg in 1752.
Their mother Anne died in 1735 and John was dead by 1742 because one of the two surviving children, Samuel was apprenticed out to Thomas Edwards of Goochland to learn the trade of Carpentry. He was listed as an orphan and by my estimation it may have been the daughter Anne or it may have been the daughter Honour who John Gaulding buried in a "winding sheet'. Where is she buried, and where are John Gaulding and Anne for that matter. Samuel Gaulding, the orphan who learned a trade was my direct ancestor.
Genealogists, even amateur ones.. we are just storytellers looking for the end of the story. Maybe John Gaulding and Anne didn't think the story of their lives was worth telling. Maybe they were just trying to live from day to day. We walked around the cemetery, looked in the windows of the brick building. I picked up an acorn and put it in my pocket. We got back in the car, drove down the road lined with leaning tombstones and merged back onto Interstate 64 and into the 21st century.
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