Theodorus Kinsman Jr, farmer

United States 6c Lincoln, carmine, Scott # 148 (issued 1870), on international cover from Boston, Mass. to West Cornwallis, Nova Scotia. Addressed to Mr. Theodorus Kinsman Jr., West Cornwallis, Nova Scotia, B.N. Manuscript "Union Square" on front, emphasized by a decorative flourish. Cancellation duplex BOSTON MASS DEC 20, Backstamp KENTVILLE N.S. DE 25 70, an arrival on Christmas Day, five days in transit. There is significant foxing of the envelope. There may be a second backstamp too faint to read.

A Planter Family on the Cornwallis Land

The Kinsmans were among Kings County's original New England Planter families. Benjamin Kinsman, an original grantee of Cornwallis Township in the 1760s, passed his three-hundred-acre lot down through his son Robert to Robert's son Theodorus Kinsman, who married in 1818 and settled on the inherited land, building what is now the designated historic Kinsman-Salsman House on Arnold Road in Grafton in an area denominated "Union Square" on A.F. Church's map of Kings County. That house still stands, remodeled in 1834 into the Classic Revival form it retains today.

Union Square in West Cornwallis Township with the Kinsman farm noted just above the place name.

This elder Theodorus married twice. His first wife, Hannah Kinsman (1798-1828) - married September 29, 1818, the same year he settled on the inherited land and began the house - bore three children before her death in 1828: Mary (1819-1859), Mehitable (1823-1882), and Samuel (182-1901). He remarried on May 13, 1829, to Esther North (1800-1858), and this second marriage produced eight more children: Olivia Ann, William Henry, Rebecca, twins Ezekiel N. and Robert N. (born the same day, December 11, 1834), Hannah Elizabeth, Charlotte, and - youngest of all - Theodorus Jr., born June 21, 1843, when his father was 51.

The elder Theodorus died December 31, 1870, aged 78, and was buried at Billtown, Kings County - just six days after this letter reached his youngest son in Kentville.

A Son Who Went to War

Their son from this second marriage, William Henry Kinsman, born June 11, 1832, went to sea as a cabin boy at fifteen, later studied law in Ohio and Iowa, and settled in Council Bluffs, where he practiced with the Hon. D. C. Bloomer. When the Civil War broke out he helped raise Company B of the 4th Iowa Infantry under his friend (and future Union general) Grenville M. Dodge, rising to captain, then to lieutenant-colonel and colonel of the 23rd Iowa Infantry.

Kinsman was killed leading his regiment's charge at the Battle of Black River Bridge, near Vicksburg, on May 17, 1863 - shot twice while urging his men over the enemy's works, dying the next morning. His last recorded words: "Tell the boys I died happy. I fell at the head of my regiment, doing my duty." His body lay lost on the battlefield for nearly forty years until it was finally recovered and reburied in Council Bluffs in 1902, with a monument raised by his old comrades and General Dodge himself.

The Cover's Own Kinsman

Theodorus "Dorus" Kinsman Jr. - this cover's recipient - was born June 21, 1843, in Cornwallis, son of the elder Theodorus Kinsman (1792-1870) and Esther (North) Kinsman (1800-1858), and a younger brother of Colonel William Henry Kinsman. He lived his whole life in the Grafton/Cornwallis area, and married Agnes Congdon (1848-1934) in 1877. Their six children were:

- William North Kinsman (1879-1951)

- Ruth Ester Kinsman (1880-1938)

- Elizabeth "Bessie" Garfield Kinsman (1881-1947)

- Alice Rebecca Kinsman (1883-1968)

- Mary Eliza Kinsman (1885-1975)

- Reginald Price Kinsman, later Dr. (1888-1977)

Theodorus Jr. died in Grafton on February 11, 1932, at 88. By the time he received this letter, he'd already lost his mother (1858) and one sister (1859) in childhood, and his brother the Colonel at Vicksburg (1863) - and his father would follow just six days later (see above).

The Sender

The strongest candidate to be this letter's sender is Ezekiel N. Kinsman (December 11, 1834 - October 12, 1895), Theodorus Jr.'s older brother - one of the twins born to Esther North in 1834, alongside Robert N. Kinsman. The 1861 Canadian census still finds him in Kings County, Nova Scotia, head of a household of four (three males, one female) - consistent with his marriage that same year, on April 21, 1861, to Elizabeth Scribner (1830-1890) in West Cornwallis. Their son Fred Chase Kinsman was born in Nova Scotia in December 1864 - the family was still home at that point. But by July 16, 1868, when their daughter Ellen Maud Kinsman was born, they were in Boston, Massachusetts. That narrows the family's emigration to sometime between late 1864 and mid-1868. A second daughter, Lizzie Gertrude Kinsman, was born in Massachusetts in June 1870 - just months before this letter was mailed from Boston that December. ("The Kinsman Family" genealogy, published in Boston in 1876, records all three children by these full names, confirming that an "Ellen M. Kinsman, b. abt. 1869" entry found in some online trees is a duplicate of Ellen Maud rather than a fourth child.)

The 1870 U.S. census confirms the family's Boston years directly: Ezekiel Kinsman, 36, born Nova Scotia, appears in Boston Ward 12 (post office South Boston), dwelling 602, working in a "planing mill" - a lumber/woodworking trade that fits naturally with his family's Nova Scotia shipping and milling background. His household: wife Elizabeth, 34; son Freddie, 5; and daughter Maud N., 2. Lizzie Gertrude, born June 16, 1870, is absent from the census household - likely because she arrived just after the enumeration date. An 1877 city directory later shows him still in the South Boston area (73 Old Harbor Street, working as a clerk)

Massachusetts vital records and his Findagrave listing agree on the same facts, independently: Ezekiel N. Kinsman, born December 11, 1834, died October 12, 1895, buried alongside Elizabeth at Forest Dale Cemetery, Malden. Multiple papers carried the story within days, one under the headline "Killed on the Track." The details are grim and specific: walking on the tracks near the Terry Street depot on the Saugus branch road, he was struck and killed instantly around 7 p.m. on October 12. "Both legs were cut off and his body badly mangled." His address is given as 4 Mt. Vernon Park, Malden - matching his naturalization record exactly - and his employer as -Howard & Frohock, last makers, a boot-and-shoe-last manufacturing firm, a trade shift from the planing mill work recorded in the 1870 census and the clerking of the 1877 directory. He was reported to have left "a grown up family"- fitting, since his three children (Fred, 31; Ellen Maud, 27; Lizzie Gertrude, 25) were all adults by then. Both papers give his age as 65, which doesn't match his documented 1834 birth year (he was 60) - likely a shared error carried by whatever wire report both drew on, rather than two independent mistakes. He was a widower - Elizabeth had died five years earlier, in 1890 - and had lived in the Boston area for roughly a quarter century by the time of his death.

A naturalization index card adds one more late detail: Ezekiel formally became a U.S. citizen on September 17, 1894 - petitioning through the U.S. Circuit Court in Boston, just over a year before his death (the card lists his birth date as December 11, 1835, a one-year discrepancy from the 1834 date on his other records, likely a simple clerical slip). After roughly three decades in Massachusetts, he made the move to citizenship formal only in his final year of life.

Ezekiel remains the best-documented Kinsman brother in the Boston area for this period, and the most plausible sender of this letter. His story now carries its own weight: a Nova Scotia farm boy who built a life and a family in industrial Boston, becoming a U.S. citizen late in life, only to die suddenly and violently on the rails there — in Malden, the town he'd just made official, thirteen months after taking that oath.