FREEMAN Walter

Notes:

Samuel and Mary's youngest child, Walter (born August 20 1759) followed his brother Jared to the open territory of Berkshire County. A farmer/blacksmith, he too first tried to achieve a competency for his family in Worcester County. He married Phanelia Child in 1784 and initially lived on and worked the farm set off to his mother (to which he had obtained title).79 Several years later he bought 136 acres in Charlton, sold rights to the Sturbridge farm to his neice's husband, and started anew. This farm apparently did not prove satisfactory either, for sometime in the 1790s Walter departed Worcester County.80

No children were recorded as being born in Sturbridge or Charlton. However, by the time on the 1800 census, Walter and Phanelia resided in West Stockbridge in Berkshire County, with a family of four sons under ten, two daugters between ten and fifteen. Walter Freeman was not listed as heading a household in Massachusetts in the 1810 census index; by then the family perhaps had moved again. Genealogist Frederick Freeman reported "some locate the family at Sturbridge, others say, 'went to Essex, Vermont.'"81 Perhaps they did.

The profiles of Jared and Walter Freeman are necessarily fairly sketchy. Family genealogists say little about them, and they are not mentioned in local histories. For them, apparently, moving to more open land did not result in achievements comparable to their father's in Sturbridge. Rather, they scrabbled with fairly little success, parallelling others in the family of their own and later generations.

Walter married CHILD Phanelia in 1784. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]