'Tale of Two Cities'

By John L McHale
1993

The science (or hobby) of genealogy is much like detective work - a clue here, a clue there, a tip, a hunch - and gradually, interesting key facts of a family history may come to light.

Discoveries by professional researchers operating in Lancashire, England, and Gloucester County, New Jersey, produced some long-hidden details on the origin of a prominent 19th Century Deptford Township gristmill operator, farmer, manufacturer and merchant. He was Daniel Lamb (1791-1867), the father of the village of Almonesson, NJ.

In the early 1800s, Lamb developed the West Deptford area that was originally called "Lambtown."
He built a community consisting mostly of housing for his mill and store workers. By mid-century, Lambtown had become better known as Almonesson Mills, adopting the Indian name for the adjoining lake. The Post Office renamed it to just plain Almonesson in 1872.

The story of Daniel Lamb was uncovered step by step. As a starling point, local history publications at the Gloucester County Historical Library in Woodbury provided researchers with some general references to his contributions A text published in 1883, "The History of the Counties of Gloucester, Salem and Cumberland Counties " by.Thomas Cushing and Charles E. Sheppard, cited Lambtown and listed Daniel Lamb's terms of office on the Deptford Township Committee. A county-wide map, more than a century and a half old, marks the location of his "store." It was situated off the Road to Good Intent, now County Road 534. But few vital facts on this important Gloucester County pioneer were known.

U.S. Census records indicated that Daniel Lamb had been born in England, and that his age in 1850 was 59. His death at Blackwood, NJ in 1867 was reported only briefly by an obituary notice in The Woodbury Constitution. However, Lamb and his wife, Catherine, followed by their Gloucester County farmer sons, James and John, left a considerable tree of descendants throughout Gloucester and Camden counties in New Jersey, as well as in many other states.One branch of these offspring developed an interest in the patriarch's life, to the extent that researchers were employed on both sides of the Atlantic to uncover Daniel Lamb's ancestral data from government and church archives.

The project had no official purpose. It was undertaken strictly in pursuit of the fast-growing hobby of genealogy. In New Jersey, the services of Mrs. Suzanne Nurnberg of Bridgeton were employed. On the other side of the Atlantic, London researcher Patricia Carroll was retained to delve into English records.

Suzanne Nurnberg at Grave

On just about any weekday, Mrs. Nurnberg, a practicing genealogist, can be found pouring into microfilm records at the state archives in Trenton. Her research into official records also takes her to county, town, church and related repositories in the southern part of the state.

"It's fantastic work," she said. "The more I find on a pedigree, the more interested I get. After a while, I feel like I know my clients' ancestors personally."

Mrs. Nurnberg learned that Daniel Lamb arrived in the United States through the port of New York in 1818. and initially settled in Somerset County. He launched his activities in Gloucester City by rebuilding a windmill on a 220-acre farm that he purchased at the confluence of Big Timber Creek and the Delaware River. He advertised in a Woodbury weekly newspaper in 1823 that he was ready to receive grain for grinding "for market or family use." The advertisement hailed Lamb's "long experience in windmills."

A month later, he also gave public notice of being an observant naturalist. A farmers' newspaper published a communication from Lamb recounting that a wren had recently nested in a mortise hole in one of his windmill's wings, which rotated while the mill operated:

"The bird hatched her young ones and continues to feed them," Lamb wrote, "regardless of the rotundent velocity of her situation, which consequently must turn the contents of the nest round as often as the wing in which it is built performs its circular movement.Notwithstanding, the skillful architect has so constructed it that her tender charge remains perfectly safe even during her absence to procure them food; and she may be seen flitting from one part of the wing to another, tuning her simple notes as it were a conscious pride of the security of her habitation."

Ms. Carroll, a member of the Order of British Empire and an affiliate of the British Association of Genealogists and Record Agents, determined that no record of Daniel Lamb existed in the central vital records in London. It was clear the hunt for his past needed to be more localized to add any detailsL.ocalization was no minor matter. Throughout the 19th Century, English births and baptisms were recorded on church registers. But, there are more than 12,000 ancient parishes. In which of these were the parents of Daniel Lamb? To sharpen the focus, Ms. Carroll required help from New Jersey.

In the state archives in Trenton, Nurnberg obtained Daniel Lamb's 1867 death certificate. She traced his burial to the First Presbyterian Churchyard in Blackwood town, Camden County.Visiting the old cemetery, Suzanne noted the grave of his wife Catherine (1787-1871) adjoining Daniel's. Several additional Lamb tombstones nearby led her to acquire helpful data information on various members of their family.The tombstones' epitaphs had eroded badly. Using a charcoal-rubbing technique, Nurnberg could barely make out Daniel's birth date, August 8, 1791.

Unfortunately, due to the erosion through the passage of time, the birth place name could not be deciphered.
Returning to the state archives, Mrs. Nurnberg uncovered a copy of Daniel Lamb's citizenship award of 1828. It was in a file labeled "loose papers." It disclosed that Lamb had immigrated to Somerset County in 1818 from Lancashire, a county on England's Northwest coast.Carroll, having her English search thereby substantially narrowed, wrote from London: "Good, now we can get somewhere."

However, the task was not yet simple because Lancashire has over 300 parishes. Records of some of these were indexed for genealogical purposes in recent years by volunteers of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons).

A Descendant Visits

But, with Daniel Lamb's name not appearing in these centralized annals, it seemed that all 300 Lancashire parish records might have to be combed. The search went back to the tombstone and the aid of Mr. Tracey Fallen of Woodbury, a Gloucester Township elementary school teacher, was enlisted. In 1983, Fallon had led a group of sixth-grade pupils to the Blackwood churchyard as part of an annual class historical outing. The project's purpose included visiting old churchyards to record epitaphs for posterity.

Mr. Fallon started his program 10 years earlier — partly to help preserve some Gloucester Township heritage, and partly for the student's personal benefit in enhancing their understanding of history-related subjects.

"They learn a lot," Fallon said. "They became anthropologists or archaeologists for a day. It's exciting for them to put to use what they learn in the classroom."

Fallon reviewed the students' 1983 gravestone records, and then paid a return visit to the Lamb grave site. The students had been able to make out little more than Daniel Lamb's weathered name on the inscription. Fallon, now applying chalk, was able to confirm the birth date and to discern that Lamb had been born in an illegible place name preceding the word "Lancashire."

Nurnberg and Fallon were in accord that the inscribed birth town name contained only five characters. The final character appeared to be an "N" and to Fallon, the middle letter looked like a "G." Carroll drafted a list of all Lancashire towns containing five characters. One name seemed to solve the riddle: the Lancashire city of Wigan.
This finding led Carroll to Daniel Lamb's baptism of August 26, 1791, recorded in the Bishopric records of Wigan's All Saints Episcopal Church. The birth date matched that of the grave record. The register identified his parents, James, a miller, and Mary, a daughter of John and Mary Clithero. Further checking of the All Saints register, this time by Peter Stanford — an internationally registered British genealogist situated in Colne, Lancashire — yielded the identities of Daniel's nine siblings and various other kin as well as of his paternal grandfather, who also bore the name Daniel Lamb.Stanford, a former college lecturer, described his role in the research as "hard work, but an adventure." He credited genealogy with helping to fulfill a "lifelong interest in economic and social history — understanding how people lived, what they did, why they moved and so on."

Stanford found that residents named Lamb were recorded in Lancashire as early as the 1300s. Wigan, during Lamb's time, was largely rural. Today it is a small city in the industrial heartland midway between two larger metropolises — Liverpool and Manchester.Thus, through the cooperative international project by a New Jersey genealogist and two fellow researchers in England, the record of the Daniel Lamb family ancestral history was satisfactorily completed.
Daniel's widow, Catherine, died at Blackwood in 1871 at age 83. The International Genealogical Index records a wedding of Daniel Lamb and Catherine Wallace at the village of Deane, near Wigan, in 1809.Catherine's maiden name is believed to have been Wallace, although that fact has not been confirmed.

Meanwhile, further evidence obtained from New Jersey records sketched a record of Daniel Lamb's activities in South Jersey. He sold his Big Timber Creek windmill in about 1828, the year in which he was granted his United States citizenship at the Woodbury courthouse. Shortly thereafter he purchased a water-driven gristmill on Almonesson Creek. About 1830, he converted that mill to a cotton factory. He prospered steadily, erecting housing for his employees and becoming one of the county's largest landowners. The housing was generally clustered between the Road to Good Intent and what is now Cooper Street.

During the years that Lambtown thrived, the cotton factory became a community focal place. The wedding of Lamb's son, John, to Mary Ann Matlack was held there in 1834. By 1842, Daniel's cotton factory contained "a dyeing house, sizing house, drying house, smith shop, stone store, shoemaker's shop and 14 tenements among the buildings connected with the plant," according to notes contained in local history volumes of the Gloucester County Historical Society. Daniel confined his activity to farming after the cotton factory was destroyed by a creek flood in the 1840s. Successive gristmills, built at Almonesson Creek by later owners, duplicated the fate of the Lamb factory during the next three decades.

Almonesson Lake attracted thousands of picnickers and vacationers to its natural beauty. It was operated as a recreation park for more than half a century, until the late 1950s. The 30-acre waterway was popular for swimming, boating, fishing and skating. Sundays featured concerts by a military band.

Daniels' sons, James (1810-1852) and John (1812-1891), who were both also born in Lancashire, operated farms in Barnsboro and Mantua respectively.Shortly after the turn of the century, David T. Lamb, a grandson of Daniel's son James, founded a smaller community south of Grenloch in what is now Camden County. He named it Lambs Terrace.

Offspring of Daniel Lamb's son John included Daniel L. Lamb, (1835-1909), a farmer, whose son, Charles S. Lamb (1866-1941), was a commission merchant in Camden. Descendants of Charles S. Lamb's daughters Elsie Lamb Engel (1900-1987), Edith Lamb McHale (1895-1932) and Virginia Lamb Mead-Rishor (1897-1983), all natives of Camden, were among the Daniel Lamb successors who commissioned the research on the Gloucesterj County patriarch's life.

The Daniel Lamb project achieved more than merely relating the life-and-death details of one family's migration to its newly adopted country. Overall, the findings illustrated how genealogy, the pursuit of clues to learn ancestral roots, can also help to trace an area's historic development.