By Bernie Shellum
James Haycraft was a chimneysweep who, in the mean 18th Century streets of Middlesex, England, could not always be sure how or where he would find his next meal.One such moment occurred on April 6, 1744. By his own account, Haycraft had previously browsed a shop owned by one William Griffiths and had come to admire some of the items for sale. Unfortunately for him, in the wee hours of April 6, someone broke into the Griffiths shop and made off with a trunk full of merchandise.Before long, the stolen items turned up for sale in the stall of one Francis Whiting in Holborn, who told investigators that those items had been offered to him by two women. One of them was Ann Henley, otherwise known as Haycraft's wife of three years. The other was the common-law wife of Samuel Smytheman, a partner of Haycraft.Under questioning, Whiting admitted that he had bought four razors, five pairs of iron shoe buckles, two pairs of copper shoe buckles, two pairs of copper knee buckles, three white metal stock buckles, three iron stock buckles, one pair of iron knee buckles, one iron breeches buckle, two steel corkscrews, three iron snuff boxes, one horn tobacco box, twelve clasp penknives, five pairs of steel scythes, two white metal teaspoons, one pair of steel tweezers, sour steel stay hooks, one metal girdle buckle, one white metal sword belt buckle, one steel tooth-pick case, one steel pencil case, one pair of steel plyers, two bath metal seals, two women's necklaces, two pairs of earrings, twelve pairs of ivory studs, ninety-six pairs of bath metal buttons, a dozen small rings, a wooden picture case, three ivory handled knives, three ivory-handled forks eight buck-handled knives, two buck-handled forks, and nine buck-handled knives without inquiring deeply into how the items might have been obtained. If they happened to come by some handkerchiefs, Whiting told the women, he would be in the market for those, too.On the basis of this and other evidence, Haycraft, Henley, Smytheman, and his wife, Elizabeth Eaton, were indicted for theft. Henley was acquitted at trial, but Haycraft and the other two were convicted, perhaps because Smytheman had confessed that he and Haycraft had carried out not only the Griffiths burglary, but many others as well in streets that later would become part of Greater London.All three were sentenced to transportation for seven years. In English, that meant they would be shipped to America as indentured servants for seven years, then they would be freed.We next pick up the trail of James Haycraft in Virginia, where he fathered a daughter and three sons by a woman whose identity remains uncertain. The daughter died in infancy. The boys names were Samuel, born in 1752, and Joshua and James, whose birth dates are unknown.Whether James Haycraft's first wife, Ann Henley, ever traveled to America is not known. What is known is that both Haycraft and the boys' mother died young, leaving their upbringing in the hands of a well-to-do Col. John Neville, who later became a general.This was fortuitous for the Haycraft sons, and became the basis for revenge of a sort. James Haycraft had been prosecuted and deported from England under King George II. It was King George III who riled the founding fathers to the point of rebellion. All three of the Haycraft boys enlisted in the Continental Army, whose objective was to purge the power of the English throne from American soil.This, the army did. The throne that had deported Haycraft from England had now been deported from America, with the help of Haycraft's sturdy sons.After the Revolutionary War had been won, all three Haycrafts, still young and single, set out for Kentucky. Along the way, they fell in with another westward moving pioneer family, and love blossomed. Pausing in Fort Pitt, Penn., Samuel Haycraft, in uniform, married Margaret Van Meter, a union that would produce nine children.All of those children were born in Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky, where all three of James Haycraft's sons put down roots. James Haycraft II was killed by Indians in Hardin County, leaving an infant son, James Haycraft III, who was subsequently raised by his uncle, Samuel.A baptist preacher, James III married Frances Van Meter, and fathered a large family, including Samuel J. Haycraft, who also became a baptist preacher. Samuel married Ailsey Rhoads, and fathered a family of four boys and two girls, the oldest being Isaac Haycraft, born in Hardin County on June 28, 1829.As a child, Isaac moved with his parents to Macoupin, IL, where he married a Kentucky woman named Sarah P. Jolly. In 1861, they and other members of the Haycraft family traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi River to St. Paul, then over land to Farmington, and later to Madelia, 10 miles from the farm where I would later grow up. That farm had originally been settled by my great-grandfather, John Nelson, a Norwegian immigrant, in the early 1870s. His daugher, Randine, married Hans Shellum, also a Norwegian immigrant, and they became my grandparents.Randine Nelson's sister, Mina, married Andrew Bjoin Anderson, and they had a daugher, Iola, who married Beryl Haycraft, a member of the seventh generation of the family of James Haycraft, the convicted burglar.Not surprisingly, some Haycraft family members still raise doubts about the patriarch's theft conviction, arguing that James Haycraft may have committed a petty crime to bring about his own deportation to America.Perhaps, but that's not the way to bet. Some thieves were branded in those days, and many were hanged. The odds on getting a relatively mild penalty such as deportation weren't high. Some genealogists who are knowledgeable about English history even question whether a chimneysweep would have known what, or where, America was in the mid-18th Century.
