There were two James Rigbys, and I had been mixing them
The 1798 U.S. Direct Tax describes buildings individually, with dimensions and materials. It gives James Rigby, occupant, on a hundred acres in Newtown township belonging to Samuel Black: a dwelling house eighteen feet by twenty-three, stone, one storey, a wooden kitchen eighteen by nineteen behind it, a barn, a stable, and the note “adjoining Enos Worrall & others.”
We had been treating that as the one physical description of a building James Rigby lived in.
Then a sheet turned up headed “A List of the Taxable Inhabitants of Marple taken in 1800” — the septennial census, a hundred and twenty-eight names, certified for Delaware County by Philip Moore. In the third column: James Rigbey.
And our James is enumerated in Aston in the federal census of the same year.
One man cannot be a taxable inhabitant of Marple and a household head in Aston in the same year. There were two James Rigbys in the county.
Look at who else is on the Marple list: Enos Worrall — the adjoining owner named in the 1798 Newtown entry. The 1798 form is headed “Newtown and part of Marple.” And a Marple rate of about 1787 already paired James Rigby with a Daniel Rigby on the same sheet.
So there is a continuous northern household — Marple, Newtown, probably Edgmont — running from roughly 1787 through 1800, with its own James and its own Daniel. The stone house is probably his.
The Marple material had already been flagged a week earlier as unresolved — the note read “do not merge them yet; do not dismiss them either.” The 1800 sheet settles it toward separate. Every undated tax image now has to be attributed against two profiles rather than one:
| Ours (southern) | The other (northern) | |
|---|---|---|
| Townships | Concord, Upper & Lower Chichester, Aston, Middletown | Marple, Newtown, ?Edgmont |
| Attested | 1760 clerk · c.1768 Concord · 1774 & 1781 Aston · 1790 Middletown · 1793, 1798, 1800 Aston | c.1787 Marple · 1798 Newtown · 1800 Marple |
| Seen with | Duttons, Browns, Sharpless, Pyle | Daniel Rigby, Enos Worrall, Samuel Black |
The decisive test would be a will, deed or administration for a James Rigby in Delaware or Chester County dated after March 1801. Ours died on the ninth of that month.