James Is An Old Family Name
[I wrote the following statement 21 years ago, when we learned that our first grandson was to be named Robert James, after his two grandfathers. This continues a long tradition in many families, including ours. Within our branch of the Bailey family in America there has been a James in every generation. In the statement that follows, I used italic type to indicate the names of the direct antecedents of the “new” Jimmy. Siblings and other names appear in Roman type.
–Martin Bailey.]
When Robert James Leffel was born on April 24, 1987, he was given a name that has been used in the Bailey family since the immigrant ancestors settled in Rowley, Massachusetts, in 1642.
The first of these was James Bailey, who was probably born in or near Rowley, Yorkshire, England, in 1612. At the age of 26 he sailed from England in 1938. He died in Rowley, Massachusetts on August 9, 1677. The death of his wife, Lydia Emery Bailey, was recorded in the church records: “The widow aged good Sister Bayly, alas!, died 29 Apr 1704.”
Among their eight children were John and James. John and his father were given the assignment as pinders by the founders of Rowley. A pinder is an old English word meaning the pound keeper of a manor; the pinfold was an enclosure in which animals were kept. In Rowley they had charge of the hogs that otherwise roamed loose at night and in the day were driven to a section of town known as “Rooty Plain.”
John and his wife Mary Mighill Bailey also had eight children, one of whom, James, was recorded in the church rolls at the time of his baptism on 18 April 1680. The date of his birth is otherwise unknown. He eventually married Hannah Wood. Among their fourteen children were Samuel (another recurring name) and two boys each named James. The first of these died in infancy and the next baby was named for the first.
Samuel Bailey, who was born on February 20, 1705, married Mary Rolf. They were living in Groveland, Massachusetts, when Samuel Jr., was born on November 11, 1728, the first of three children. He was married in 1753 to Hannah Kittridge with whom he had eight children, one of whom was named James and another Levi. At the opening of the Revolutionary War, Samuel Bailey Jr., was a member of the Andover Company of the Minute Men. He was killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill and his name appears on the bronze tablets erected by the city of Boston.
Levi Bailey—another common name in the Bailey family, at least until 1985—married Hannah Bailey, from another line of the family that had settled in Salisbury, Massachusetts. Levi and Hannah moved to Vermont where they were the founders of Bailey’s Mills. Their family of 12 included Levi Jr., and another Samuel who was born on January 14, 1794, in Windsor County, Vermont, lived for a while in Baileyville, Illinois, and died in Grundy County, Iowa, on February 14, 1891.
Samuel married Dorothy Newton. Among their nine children were yet another Samuel, another Levi, and Ransom, who was born in Vermont on February 24, 1828 and died in Cedar Falls, Iowa, in 1905. Ransom married Mary Dyer. A biography of Ransom published in Chicago in 1894 indicates that with his brothers he bought [virgin] farm land from the government, engaged in stock farming, and began a factory for making wire-tooth hay rakes.
At the close of the Civil War he sold his interest in the factory and moved to Iowa, where he owned 2,485 acres of land. Through “good sense and practical views” he “accumulated a large portion of this world’s goods.” Known as a generous contributor “to all benevolent institutions,” it was said that “no manis more universally respected.”
The three children of Ransom and Mary included another Samuel, and, this time, a James Levi who was born August 8, 1870, in Baileyville, Illinois. He married Anna Elizabeth House. For nine years he was president of the Cedar Falls, Iowa, school board. He was also a member of the Black Hawk County Board of Supervisors, the Cedar Valley District Fair Board, superintendent of the Templar Park resort hotel on Spirit Lake, and during World War I, he was chairperson of the Cedar Falls fuel administration. He and Anna, had eight children. The first born was James Millard. The fourth son was Joseph Levi, from whom Kris Bailey Scelfo inherited a painting by his grandmother (and her great-great grandmother) House.
The second son was Allen Ransom Bailey who married Kathryn Gunvor Ausland. They named their first son for his two grandfathers: James Martin. He and his wife, Betty Jane Wenzel Bailey, had two daughters, the first of whom is Kristine Elizabeth Leffel [now Kristine Elizabeth Scelfo]. She was married to Robert Leffel, and their son is Robert James Leffel.
The second son of Allen Ransom and Kathryn Bailey is Thomas Allen Bailey, who married Brada McCormick. Their second son is named James McCormick Bailey.
In the line of Baileys from Salisbury, Massachusetts, there are numerous Jameses, as there are among the descendants of the siblings of nearly all of those mentioned above.
In addition, Kathryn Bailey’s brother, James Ausland, has two sons-in-law and one grandson named James. The name seems to run in the family!