When the American Revolution is told through the lives of men, it becomes a story of enlistments, campaigns, and patriotism. When it is told through the lives of women, it becomes something very different: endurance, uncertainty, and survival. Lydia Clark Tolles, the wife of Elnathan Tolles, lived her entire adult life inside that second story.

Lydia was born on 26 August 1749, the daughter of John Clark and Mabel Lines, members of one of the oldest and most prominent families in the Milford–New Haven area of Connecticut. Through her parents, Lydia was connected to a wide web of kin, land, and church ties that would quietly shape the course of her life.¹

On 23 May 1773, Lydia was baptized as an adult at Trinity Church in New Haven, an Episcopal parish. Adult baptisms were not unusual, but they often coincided with marriage or a conscious decision to join a particular congregation. Within a short time, Lydia married Elnathan Tolles, and the two established their household in the Northbury parish of Waterbury (later Plymouth), an upland farming community not far from New Haven.¹ ²

Within two years, the world around them changed. In March 1775, Lydia gave birth to her first daughter, Frances, just as colonial New England was sliding into war. Over the next decade, Lydia would give birth to at least five more children: Sarah, Elnathan, Amos, Eunice, and Mehitabel.³

While Lydia was raising young children, her husband was repeatedly called into military service. Connecticut records place Elnathan Tolles on militia duty in 1778, 1779, 1780, 1781, and 1782, meaning Lydia often ran their household without him during the most difficult years of the war.⁴

The war ended, but stability did not follow. Elnathan died on 29 October 1789, leaving Lydia a widow with six children. Four years later, on 13 March 1793, Lydia herself died in Plymouth at only 42 years of age. Their estates were handled together in a lengthy probate process that documented their surviving children and the property they left behind.⁵

Lydia left no diary and no personal letters. What survives instead are church entries, baptisms, militia lists, and probate records. Taken together, they show a woman who endured war, childbirth, widowhood, and early death — yet still raised a family that would carry this Connecticut story westward into the new nation.

In the next post, I’ll turn to Lydia’s daughter Frances “Fanny” Tolles, whose life and identity became one of the most complicated and revealing puzzles in this family’s history.

---

Sources

Probate of Elnathan and Lydia Tolles, Plymouth (Watertown) District, Litchfield County, Connecticut, 1789–1794, combined estate file (66 pages), showing Lydia as administratrix and naming their children as heirs.he most complicated and revealing puzzles in this family’s story.

Donald Lines Jacobus, Deacon George Clark(e) of Milford, Connecticut and Some of His Descendants (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1949), entry for Lydia Clark, wife of Elnathan Tolles.

Donald Lines Jacobus, Families of New Haven, vol. VIII (New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor, 1932), Tolles family, “Elnathan & Lydia (Clark) Tolles.”

Trinity Church (Episcopal), New Haven, Connecticut, baptismal records, Frances Tolles, 12 March 1775, as abstracted in Families of New Haven.

Connecticut Revolutionary War Military Lists, 1775–1783; and U.S. Compiled Revolutionary War Military Service Records, entries for Elnathan Tolles.