In 1723, Benjamin Franklin was seventeen years old. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had not yet been born. With the signing of the Declaration of Independence still more than fifty years away, the Fourth of July came and went like any other day for the roughly half million British colonists scattered across the Thirteen Colonies.
But it was a significant day for two Maryland residents: Samuel Durbin, a toll-road watchman in the town of Owings Mill, and Ann Logsdon, the daughter of a successful farmer. On this future national holiday, the couple exchanged wedding vows at St. Paul’s Church in Baltimore. Ann was about twenty-three. Samuel was around twenty-five.
We know nothing certain about Samuel’s parents or his life before marriage. According to oral history, he may have been one of two brothers from Wales who brought this line of Durbins to the colonies by way of the Caribbean island of Nevis—the same island that would become, half a century later, the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton.
Some family historians speculate that Samuel was the son of a Thomas Durbin who was living in Maryland (also via Nevis) at roughly the right time to be his father. But this is little more than wishful genealogy. Beyond chronological and geographic plausibility, there is no firm evidence connecting Samuel to Thomas.
We know more about Ann’s family. Her father, William Logsdon, was born around 1663 in England. Her mother, Honor O’Flynn, was born in Ireland, probably around 1681—though most dates for the Logsdon family are approximate. By the early 1700s, William was living in Maryland. There, according to family lore, he met a ship of women who had been transported across the Atlantic to join the colonists. How much choice those women had in the matter is unclear. Sadly—and horrifically—it appears to have been very little.
Oral tradition holds that Honor O’Flynn was kidnapped as a teenager from the Irish coast and taken to Maryland. Around 1702, she became the wife of William Logsdon—more than thirty years her senior—and the mother of his eight children. Their first child, our six-times-great grandmother Ann Logsdon, was born in 1703. William died around 1736. Honor lived until 1742, reaching, if the date is accurate, the remarkable age of ninety.
Samuel and Ann Durbin had ten children. Their ninth child, Christopher Durbin, was born in Maryland in 1741. Samuel died in 1752, in his forties or fifties. Ann died in 1770 at the age of sixty-seven.
Next: 2. Christopher & Margaret Durbin 1763-1840
Previous: The Essential Family Tree
Michael Durbin 