Col. Ethan B. Allen - Resolving Ethan Allen’s wives

"Mary Bronson is the duplicate master profile I posted in the Make This a Master Profile Project and the response I got was basically they stay that way."

I'm sorry that's how you took my response. It wasn't intended that way at all.

There is something of a cottage industry of New England Allens trying to connect to Ethan, so lines get confused on-line pretty regularly. The best book on Allen is Duffy and Muller's Inventing Ethan Allen (2014), which uses the spelling "Brownson." The "Bronsons" seem to come further down the line.

Per Duffy and Muller, Mary's parents were Cornelius Brownson, Jr. (1692-1772) and Abigail Jackson (1693-1772), both of Woodbury, Connecticut. Their children were Stephen, Elijah, Gideon, Jedidiah, Anna, Abraham, John, Mary, Israel, and Patience.

I would not use the New England Historical Society website as a source; it's a well-intended for-profit website, not a historical society, and they get a lot of things incorrect.

The Connecticut SAR also goes with Cornelius Brownson (with the "w"): https://www.sarconnecticut.org/a-band-of-cousins/

(We should tag Mary Allen and Mary Allen here.)

Randall's Ethan Allen: His Life and Times (2012) is also supposed to be good, though I haven't read it. It's another book debunking a lot of the mythology. At least based on the Google Books preview, he also uses "Brownson" for the whole family, and gives us a little bit more info about Mary as a person (starting here).

I’m working on Frances ‘Fanny’ Penniman

Aside from her disputed parentage, she’s missing a lot of family. I did however find her earrings.:).

Apparently Ethan Allen did not care for his 1st wife much. Tell us (by link) who her parents were? Thanks!

I unlocked Mary Allen so it can be worked on.

I'm not convinced we know who Fanny's parents were!

This account says the family believed her surname was "Montezuma." A great-grandson who went through Schoharie records said her father was Monte Montesque. Capt. John Montresor denied being her father.

Let me dig through Duffy and Muller...I have a hard copy, so no easy linking, sorry. :)

Our best bet might be David Bryan from the Allen Homestead...a somewhat entertaining overview of her is here. ("She is a mystery woman, but not because she tried to be.") He says her father was Maj. James Montresor and her mother was a Catherine, birth surname not given.

Yes, please post what you find, I’m more concerned with getting her actual family in place. Personally? So far - I think “Mother Anna died in childbirth” is invented, the surname Montezuma is invented, the link to anyone (garbled) Montresor is absolutely because she tried to be a mystery. And she’s the out of wedlock daughter of Margaret Schoolcraft, by who knows who, who then married like the biggest Tory in New York. You think Ethan Allen wanted this publicized? Not that he cares, actually. :)

Brownson, on the other hand, seems quite knowable, so let me know which parents, so we can put the dups to rest.

Re: Her stepfather was the late Crean Brush, Allen’s archest of rivals during the Revolution, an influential British sympathizer who had put a price on Allen’s head. But Allen was willing to overlook a little thing like a death warrant when he met Fanny, 23. She was by all accounts brainy and beautiful. …

That’s hilarious. And honestly, would make a great miniseries. One theory is that she was in fact Crean Brush’s biological daughter as well as adoptive.

Duffy and Muller, p. 106:

"Born in 1760, Montresor was the natural daughter of Anna Schoolcraft of Scoharie, New York, and Captain John Montresor of the British Army Corps of Engineers. She grew up in Crean Brush's household, and she married Ethan Allen in 1784."

So that's not helpful...I wanted them to agree with Bryan! :)

From p. 123:

"Tales of shrewish and alluring wives provide fodder for two significant strains in the Ethan Allen story. In 1761 Ethan Allen married Mary Brownson, a woman he had known for several years from carrying grain to her father's gristmill. She bore him five children and died in 1783. Remarking snidely that Mary was five (sometimes six) years older than her husband, Allen's partisan biographers baldly and repeatedly contrasted Mary with their freethinker hero, invariably to her disadvantage. They portrayed her as illiterate and, worse, as a hectoring, whining Puritan shrew. While he wrote pamphlets and books, displaying his intellectual prowess, she prayed or scolded. Charles Jellison visits the shrewish wife theme several times, most egregiously when, without qualification, he reports than Allen's rented house in Bennington in 1780 'safely removed [him] from the strident whines of his wife for two years.' Other than describing Mary chasing her brothers from her home during their dispute with her husband over the dissolution of their lead mining venture in 1765, her spouse's biographers have rendered Mary speechless over two centuries."

From p. 124:

"Accounts of Allen's second wife painted another portrait. Frances Allen's origins remained only vaguely known or perhaps intentionally disguised until the late twentieth century. Her 1840s tombstone in Burlington preposterously calls her Frances Montezuma. Benjamin H. Hall's History of Eastern Vermont... (1858) calls her Frances Montuzan. Her father, John Montresor, a captain in the 48th Foot Regiment during the French and Indian Wars and later commissioned in the Corps of Engineers, was a cousin of Anthony Haswell, Ethan Allen's friend and the publisher of Bennington's Vermont Gazette, and a cousin of Boston's Susannah Haswell Rowson, the author of Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (London, 1790)." [This is followed by a description of the Charlotte Temple story, which was allegedly a fictionalized account of Montresor and Schoolcraft's relationship.]

From p. 125:

"Frances Montresor's variously misspelled name suggests an intentional breakdown of lineage. The first report of General Allen's remarriage provided a first instance of lineage breakdown, with an error similar to those found later in the accounts of his death and burial in 1789. The Vermont Gazette of February 21, 1784, announced: 'Married at Westminster, on the 9th of Feb., the Honorable General Ethan Allen, to the amiable Mrs. Lydia [sic] Buchanan, a lady possessing, in an eminent degree, every graceful qualification to render the hymenial bonds felicitous.' The error in her Christian name as it appeared in her wedding announcement seems odd, especially as Anthony Haswell, the Vermont Gazette 's publisher, was Frances's cousin. But her Allen descendants also later repeatedly misconstrued Frances Montresor's family name as Montague and in the 1840s on the memorial stone marking her grave as Montezuma. Her misnaming suggests Ethan Allen's surviving children and grandchildren knew little about their mother and stepmother. As Henderson suggests, for Frances Allen family lineage dissolved. Some of Ethan Allen's descendants also seem to have harbored resentment or other adverse feelings about their stepmother." [And then a lot more, but I'm going to run up against copyright issues if I transcribe much more, plus my hands are now killing me :)]

"to render the hymenial bonds felicitous"!!!

All right, one more, from p. 128:

"One biographer asserted that Ethan had married Mary Brownson for her father's assets. An unlikely speculation, however, as Allen surely realized when he counted the ten competing siblings."

It's actually nine competing siblings, ten children total, but it made me chuckle.

Bought this book a few years ago at a Vermont library sale...should've read it sooner. :)

What is the concern with the Marys' parents -- just the dates? I think Cornelius is pretty much certain.

This seems to be the most up to date Schoolcraft research. Margaret is briefly discussed, with references to the artifacts and documents held at Fort Ticonderoga Museum, on page 81 of this PDF.

“The Schoolcraft Families of Schoharie, NY and Missisquoi County, QC.” By David J. Ellis. (2014)<PDF >

Needless to say, there’s no Anna Schoolcraft.

Re: "to render the hymenial bonds felicitous"!!!

Fanny was a widow, you know. :):)

Interestingly, the Museum paintings at Ft Ticonderoga swear the non existent Anna was Fanny’s mother. I wonder what her Penniman children have for lineage. Anyway, I’ll merge Anna into Margaret. Despite Wikipedia. And the “shrewish” Marys.

19th century genealogy is hilarious.