One day ago I published a correction. The Two Solomon Wheelers: How the Warrant in Hand Slipped Away established that the 1777 Rockingham County arrest warrant belongs to Solomon Wheeler of Kingston, not my ancestor. My Solomon, born 1746/7 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, husband of Zipporah Harrington, later of Westmoreland, New Hampshire, had no known service in either state. The compiled service records of Massachusetts and New Hampshire are both silent on him. The line appeared to have no patriot.
It took less than a day to prove that wrong.
The clue that was already in my own tree#
I had been searching New Hampshire and Massachusetts because that is where Solomon lived: Shrewsbury until roughly 1774, then Westmoreland from roughly 1780. What I had never stopped to account for was the gap, those six years between leaving Shrewsbury and arriving in Westmoreland.
The answer was sitting in a source I already owned. The genealogical section of the History of Westmoreland (Great Meadow), New Hampshire (1976), page 574, lists Solomon and Zipporah’s ten children with birthplaces. Two of those birthplaces are not in Massachusetts or New Hampshire at all. Son Abijah was born at North Marlborough, Vermont, on May 10, 1776. Daughter Miriam Eager was born at Brattleboro, Vermont, on October 2, 1778.
The family’s route was Shrewsbury, then Marlborough, Vermont, then Brattleboro, and finally Westmoreland around 1780. I had spent weeks searching the wrong states.
(Page 574 also records my direct ancestor Barnard, born 1788, as their ninth child.)
What Vermont held#
Marlborough sits in Windham County, in the southeast corner of Vermont, in what was then known as the New Hampshire Grants. Elroy McKendree Newton’s History of the Town of Marlborough, Windham County, Vermont (1930) prints the town’s first recorded town meeting from Town Records Vol. I, page 1, on pages 85-86. It records what the freeholders of New Marlborough voted on May 8, 1775.
That date is nineteen days after Lexington and Concord.
The meeting text, as Newton prints it:
At a legal meeting on the 8th day of May, 1775, the freeholders of the inhabitants of New Marlborough, in the County of Cumberland after choosing Captain Francis Whitmore, Moderator, passed the following votes, viz.: … 5th. Voted Solomon Wheeler and Elias Burbank, Collectors. 6th. Voted 4 Surveyors of highways, viz.: Elias Burbank, Solomon Wheeler, Perez Stockwell, Jonathan Howard Jun.
Solomon Wheeler was elected Collector, the town’s tax officer, at the first recorded town meeting in Marlborough’s history.
The same source records the second town meeting, May 22, 1775. At that meeting the same freeholders voted to send a delegate toward the New York Provincial Congress, resolved that “all Courts in this Colony held by the authority of George the Third, King of England, ought to be suspended,” pledged “at the expense of our lives and fortunes to the last extremity” to oppose the acts of Parliament, and voted to be “subject to the honorable Continental Congress.”
Two weeks into Solomon Wheeler’s term as Collector, the town he served had formally declared for the Revolution.
Why this counts#
The SAR Genealogy Policy Manual defines Civil Service (section 2.2000) as public business conducted under a government supporting the Revolution, between April 19, 1775 and November 25, 1783. Section 2.2002c lists qualifying local offices, and tax collector is named explicitly. An elected Collector in a town that resolved for the Continental Congress qualifies under that definition. Solomon’s service ran at least through the following year, given that Abijah was born at Marlborough in May 1776.
There is also a DAR dimension. DAR’s General Research Service carries ancestor record A124044 for this Solomon: Solomon Wheeler, spouse Zipporah Harrington. That record has included a note since 1986 stating that the previously claimed sheriff service “belongs to a Rockingham Co man” and that future applicants must prove correct service before their applications can proceed. That flag was written forty years before I found the Marlborough town record. The elected Collectorship at New Marlborough is the correct service DAR flagged as still to be proved.
Why this is the same Solomon#
The correlation is straightforward. The Westmoreland town history’s list of children and birthplaces, page 574, is the source: it places the family at Marlborough in May 1776 and at Brattleboro in October 1778, then records their arrival at Westmoreland around 1780. That source has no stake in Revolutionary claims. The progression is coherent with everything else known: Shrewsbury through the early 1770s, Vermont through the mid-to-late war years, Westmoreland from about 1780 onward.
No other Solomon Wheeler appears in any Vermont record searched for this period. Frederic Goodrich’s Rolls of the Soldiers in the Revolutionary War contains no Solomon Wheeler at all. The only Solomon Wheeler in New York Revolutionary records is an Amenia, Dutchess County man. The Vermont record is clear.
The Collector elected at Marlborough’s first town meeting is my Solomon Wheeler.
What comes next#
A certified copy of Town Records Vol. I, page 1 has been requested from the Marlboro, Vermont, town clerk. An SAR supplemental application using this service is in preparation. Neither has been approved; I am recording the steps as they happen.
Three articles in three days. The warrant in hand turned out to belong to another man, and losing it forced a harder look at sources I already had. The real story was waiting in a town meeting book in Vermont, where, nineteen days after Lexington, an ordinary farmer was elected to the unglamorous work of collecting his neighbors’ taxes for a town that had just pledged its lives and fortunes to the Revolution.
Sources#
- History of Westmoreland (Great Meadow), New Hampshire (1976), p. 574.
- Newton, History of the Town of Marlborough, Windham County, Vermont (1930), pp. 85-86, printing Town Records Vol. I, p. 1.
- SAR Genealogy Policy Manual, sections 2.2000, 2.2002c.
- DAR General Research Service, Ancestor A124044 (Solomon Wheeler, spouse Zipporah Harrington).
- Goodrich, Rolls of the Soldiers in the Revolutionary War.
Previous posts in this series:
- Finally A Wheeler — January 4, 2026
- The Deputy Sheriff Question — January 5, 2026
- The Warrant in Hand — July 18, 2026
- The Two Solomon Wheelers — July 19, 2026