Thomas2 Caverly (Moses1)
Thomas Caverly was born in Portsmouth, N.H. in 1737, son of Moses and Margaret (Cotton) Caverly. He married Keziah Holmes. He died in Barrington, Strafford County, New Hampshire January 1832 at the age of 93 years and 8 months, at the time the oldest man in Barrington, and was buried in the Moses Caverly Family Cemetery in Barrington.1
Thomas and Keziah had seven children: Nathaniel, Ephraim, Betsey, Margaret, John, Abra, and Moses.2
Thomas served in a variety of roles for the town of Barrington, including constable, surveyor of highways, hoggreave, tithingman, and petit juror for the inferior court of common pleas.3 He was one of twelve men in Barrington who were likely of the Quaker faith who refused to sign the Association test to take up arms against England during the Revolutionary War. His refusal to sign indicates that he may have been a Quaker. Quaker pacifist principles prohibited church members from participating in war. Quaker churches severely disciplined members of their faith who chose to fight in the Revolution.4
Below is an excerpt from the Journal of Reverend Enoch Hayes Place, a Free-Will Baptist minister and spiritual advisor to the Caverly family. Reverend Place attended the family and gave the sermon Thomas's funeral: 5
Tuesday, January 31, 1832: Preached at the funeral of Mr. Thomas Caverly at Barrington, aged 93 years and 8 months. Mr. Caverly, I am told, was the oldest man in that town.
References:
1 Robert B. Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family from the year 1116 to 1880, Made Profitable and Exemplified by Many a Lesson of Life (Lowell, Mass: George M. Elliott, 1880), 65-67.
2 Barrington, New Hampshire Town Records, microfilm, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, Massachusetts, 1:682. Hereinafter cited as Barrington TRs.
3 Barrington TRs, 1:509, 516, 538, 586, 631.
4 New Hampshire State Papers, 40 volumes (Concord, N.H.: The State, 1867-1943; online at New Hampshire State Archives, http://www.sos.nh.gov/archives/), 30:13. Morton H. Wiggin, A History of Barrington, N.H. (1966), 58. Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 177-81.
5 William E. Wentworth, Journals of Enoch Hayes Place, 2 vols. (Boston, Mass.: NEHGS and NHSOG, 1998), 1:336.
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