Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

CHAPTER I
WHEN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS NEW
EPTEMBER 14, 181 1, must ever be regarded
as an important date in the annals of the Watkins
family, for upon that day was born to our
grandparents, James and Rachel Badgely Watkins,
their third and last child, Benjamin Utter
Watkins. This record I find in the old family
Bible, written with a quill pen by some ancestor
who long ago passed on from sight. What memories come to
me, their granddaughter, on this one hundredth anniversary
of the birth of their son and our father, Benjamin Watkins! I
am happy, in beginning this history of our family, to pay a
tribute to so worthy an ancestor, and I feel as I write that we
have just cause to be proud of the root from which this present
family sprang.
James Watkins was born in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, in
the reign of our then "Sovereign Lord, King George III," on
Saturday, July 30, 1768. His father, Joseph Watkins, was of
English descent, and his name would mark him as of Welsh
origin. It seems little that we know of him, and yet we do
possess some authentic information concerning this ancestor.
He was a mechanic of Elizabethtown before the Revolution,
and once owned a sailboat plying between a port in New Jersey
and New York City. He lost all his property in the collapse
of Revolutionary currency. He married Elizabeth Spinning,