This just gets more and more interesting. It looks like “my” Joseph Peters was born in 1772 in Chatham, Middlesex, Connecticut and his father, Samuel Peters, was born in Hebron, New York. It looks like they migrated to Canada (probably because of the American Revolution) and ended up in Ernestown, Ontario (near Kingston). Joseph ends up dying in 1841.
The “other” Joseph Peters was born in 1770 in Ernestown, Ontario and ended up moving, at some point, to England where he died. No wonder people conflated them.
Making it even more brain-teasing, for me, is that a lot of my family comes from the area around Chatham, Ontario (which has a nearby Middlesex county for good measure). It’s hard to see Chatham, Connecticut and not think, “wait, is that a mistake?”
Another Torontonian, Sheila Dowdell, seems to have done a lot of legwork on this family — although it turns out that the genealogy of Dorcas Watchman Snyder is the history that’s harder to get at the truth of. She’s written some interesting posts on bulletin boards and has copies of Joseph’s birth, marriage, and death records on a Mundia.com profile.
