1696 "On September 16, 1696, John Gillett and his militia companion John Smead were by their own account 'tracking bees' when set upon by a small band of Mohawk. Smead managed to slip away but the Indians held Gillett fast. The Mohawks then proceeded further into Deerfield and raided the prominent Belden Household. The party returned to Gillett's location with three new captives in tow: Daniel Belden, the family patriarch in his mid-forties; his son Nathaniel, a young man about Gillett's age; and his daughter Hester, a few years younger than Nathaniel ... The four captives were then conducted up the Connecticut and White River valleys at a fast march, appearing in the Mohawk settlement of Coughnawaga (then at Sault-Saint-Louis on the Saint Louis rapids above Montreal) no more than three weeks later ... The three men were separated from Hester, stripped naked, and made to run a guntlet of Mohawk women and children." [1]
1696 On October 9, Marie Barbier of the Congrégation Notre-Dame purchased twenty-five-year-old John Gillett from the Mohawks. [2]
1697 In September 1697, John Gillett "was sent on a ship to the prison in La Rochelle, France, where he suffered confinement for some months ... The later shipment of other captives to La Rochelle, and Gillett's eventual redemption by the 'Charitie of some English Marchants,' suggests the existence of a network whereby Canadian captive holders could profit by trading through middlemen in France." [3]
1699/1700 John Gillet and Experience Dewey were married on January 3 in Lebanon, Connecticut. [4]
1701 Daughter Experience was born to John and Experience Gillet on 18 August in Lebanon, Connecticut. [5]
1702 Son John was born to John and Experience Gillet on 7 October in Lebanon, Connecticut. [6]
1711 Son Gershom was born to John and Experience Gillet on 26 June in Lebanon, Connecticut. [7]
[1] William Henry Foster, The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier (Ithaca: The Cornell University Press, 2003), 37, [GoogleBooks].
[2] William Henry Foster, The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier (Ithaca: The Cornell University Press, 2003), 34, [GoogleBooks].
[3] William Henry Foster, The Captors' Narrative: Catholic Women and Their Puritan Men on the Early American Frontier (Ithaca: The Cornell University Press, 2003), 51, [GoogleBooks].
[4] Connecticut Vital Records to 1870, Lucius Barnes Barbour Collection, Lebanon 1700-1854 (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2011), 70, [AmericanAncestors].
[5] Connecticut Vital Records to 1870, Lucius Barnes Barbour Collection, Lebanon 1700-1854 (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2011), 70, [AmericanAncestors].
[6] Connecticut Vital Records to 1870, Lucius Barnes Barbour Collection, Lebanon 1700-1854 (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2011), 70, [AmericanAncestors].
[7] Connecticut Vital Records to 1870, Lucius Barnes Barbour Collection, Lebanon 1700-1854 (New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2011), 70, [AmericanAncestors].