Charles Monaghan | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Charles Monaghan | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Hatch and Brood of Time: Five Phelps Families in the Atlantic World, 1720–1880. By Peter Haring Judd. (Boston: Newbury Street, 1999. xxxvi, 464 pp. $40.00, ISBN 0-88082-092-6.)

Peter Haring Judd took a doctorate in history at Columbia University and then went into business. This book, his first, combines a genealogy (112 pages, 1,065 footnotes) with five essays on families in his line. Anyone working in family history knows how valuable genealogical studies can be. But Judd's labor of love raises the bar—his essays, sound and filled with revelatory detail, make this a book of real worth. 1

His first American forebears, William and Anne Phelps, sailed in 1630 on the Mary and John ("that great ark of West Country Puritanism," David Hackett Fischer calls it in his foreword). Judd's first essay focuses on their descendant Alexander Phelps (1724–1773). Born in Hebron, Connecticut, Alexander went to Yale and became a lawyer. After his first wife's death, he married Theodora, daughter of Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth. Alexander became a Whig but also an Anglican, invested and prospered, and died at 49. 2

Rev. Benajah Phelps (1737–1817), another Yale man, son of Alexander's half brother, is treated in the second essay. After the Seven Years' War, a body of Connecticut families moved to Nova Scotia to French Acadian lands. Benajah, a Congregationalist, went as their minister. After the Revolution began, he also chose the Whig cause and had to flee back to Connecticut. He lived to be 80. . . .

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