Ties To Mary Hawley Found—

Former Newtown Residents Surprised By Results Of Genealogical Research

By Nancy K. Crevier

Shirley and Don Lawrenson were traveling from Moscow to St Petersburg aboard a riverboat, so they missed the annual Labor Day Parade in Newtown. It is a pity, as Mrs Lawrenson is the eighth cousin twice removed of Mary Elizabeth Hawley, this year’s honored grand marshal.

It would not be the first time she misconnected with her famous Connecticut cousin. The entire 31 years that Shirley Lawrenson lived in Newtown, from 1968 to 1999, she never knew about her family ties to the town’s most famous benefactress.

Raised in Oregon, about as far from the East Coast as one can get, Mrs Lawrenson (nee Shirley Dale Shockley) never considered that she might have a connection here. When she did inquire about her ancestry, she says, “I got the Western story. As far as my family was concerned, we went back to Oklahoma and Iowa. That’s as far as we went.”

Strangely enough, though, she felt a pull to the Atlantic coast. “All my life I wanted to come to New England,” she remembers. Her wish came true when her fiancé, Don Lawrenson, could not get leave from the Navy for their wedding in Portland, Ore. She traveled to Newport, R.I., and they tied the knot there, honeymooning in Boston.

However, the couple was not to stay in New England at that time. Mr Lawrence’s duties in the Navy and with General Electric led them to live all over the country, before they finally landed in Connecticut. Even then, it was several years before she was aware that her ancestors had once lived in this state.

“We were visiting an aunt in Oklahoma about 15 or 16 years ago,” Mrs Lawrenson recalls, “and she had a whole bunch of photos she didn’t want anymore. She couldn’t remember who they were and didn’t care. She was going to throw them all out.” Mrs Lawrenson opted to take the whole batch back to Connecticut, but was particularly intrigued by a small box in which she discovered the obituary for her great-grandfather, George Nelson Coe. To her surprise, it stated that he had been born in Connecticut in 1850.

Returning to Newtown, the Lawrensons hunted through genealogy records in Stamford and Newtown, but were unable to come up with anything about her great-grandfather. They let the matter lie, feeling they were at a dead end. Life went on, and retirement drew them back out West, this time to Sun City West, Ariz.

It was not until three years ago that the pieces all began to fall together. On a trip through Iowa, Mrs Lawrenson’s cousin, Sue Lackey, located George Nelson Coe’s gravesite and the family plot. Having those dates enabled Mrs Lawrenson to plug more information into ancestry.com. “We were able to trace our family back to 1340 in Essex, England,” she says. “My family came to Boston in 1643, then went to Wethersfield and on to Stamford.” Ironically, many of those ancestors eventually settled in a town called Newtown — Long Island. (The town is no longer incorporated.) One of the Coe sons stayed in Connecticut, however, and joining with other families, founded the city of Stratford in 1644.

“We thought we were Westerners all along,” laughs Mrs Lawrenson.

Ancestry.com clarified the Coe side of Mrs Lawrenson’s family history and turned up an unexpected name: Hawley. She was descended from Samuel Hawley (1594). The name of Samuel’s granddaughter, Mary Hawley caused a stir of excitement; but it was not Newtown’s Mary. Not yet….

The other branch of the Hawley/Coe family was still shrouded in mystery. Then further information discovered through the C.H. Booth Library genealogy department turned up another surprisingly familiar name to these Western transplants of Newtown. In 1678, Dorothy Hawley married John Booth, a direct ancestor of Mary Elizabeth Hawley’s mother, Sarah Edmond Booth.

“It was a link we never expected,” exclaims Mrs Lawrenson.

On a stopover in Newtown last week to break up the return from Russia, the Lawrensons had only a little time to delve into Mrs Lawrenson’s newfound family history. They did manage a trip to The Village Cemetery, where they photographed Mary Hawley’s family monument and the gravesites of the Booth family.

“We want to come back and explore the Stratford area, now,” says Mrs Lawrenson, “and more in Newtown. It would have been so exciting if we had known the relationship to the area when we lived here.”