Revolutionary War soldier's legacy pieced together, item by item

Lois Boyd and three generations of descendants of Ishmael Coffee participated last week in a discussion about him with Marian Pierre-Louis at the Medway Historical Society. (Wiqan Ang for the Boston Globe)

Like detectives, Marian Pierre-Louis and Lois Boyd piece together history.

They travel from town hall to historical society to library, collecting court records, saving marriage, birth, and death certificates, and combing through books. An obscure reference in town documents or a newspaper obituary is greeted with excitement and delight, a clue to a puzzle that is identity.

After decades, their independent journeys into genealogy brought them both to Ishmael Coffee, a poor, biracial Revolutionary War soldier from Medway whose legacy has survived against all odds.

For Boyd, it has been a personal quest to discover more about her great-great-great-great-grandfather, a parent of 16 children whose interracial marriage challenged the mores of the time.

For Pierre-Louis, a passing curiosity became a personal and professional inspiration as she learned about a man whose life illuminates the roles of race and poverty in early Massachusetts.

The women met for the first time this month at the Medway Historical Society, where genealogist Pierre-Louis presented her research into Coffee's life - a speech that drew Boyd and other descendants from as far as Washington, D.C., after they learned of it through the Internet.

Over three hours, the women discovered that they had unearthed much of the same information about the Coffee family, but had arrived at some different conclusions.

Given the job of preserving the family history by her mother in 1985, Boyd, 58, has recorded hundreds of word-of-mouth accounts, pictures, and letters in albums and on computers.

"You start saying, 'Wow, there's really a story here.' And it's your story," said Boyd, of Charlton, an accounting professional whose parents had 26 siblings. "You just kind of get bitten by the bug of wanting to know who you are, and what kind of people existed before you who might affect the way you are now."

Sometimes, it is as simple as figuring out why her aunt has catlike hazel eyes. (Records point to a distant relative on her mother's side who had hazel eyes.) Other times it's reading a letter an ancestor wrote to her son fighting in the Civil War about her outrage that President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

The trail led her to the Coffee family line on her father's side.

"By telling their story, by writing it down, by saying they were people who lived life and I am a result of that, you slowly but surely connect to them," Boyd said. "They're not just a name or something on a piece of paper that you feel no connection to.

"Each story I tell, the greater I feel, because it makes me understand myself much better."

After years of researching the Coffee family line, she has gone from referring to Coffee as her great great-great-great-grandfather to "grandpa."

Pierre-Louis didn't need a biological relationship to connect with Coffee, who came into her life unexpectedly and had a profound impact.

The professional genealogical researcher, lecturer, and writer moved three years ago to Medway, where her friends' and neighbors' curiosity about the namesake of Coffee Street and the Ishmael Coffee Estates prompted her to begin researching him in September 2006.

"Here is a man who should have left no trace in history - black, no property, poor," Pierre-Louis said of Coffee, who was born in Needham in 1741 . "But there was a wealth of information about him."

Pierre-Louis relays the following account of Coffee's life through her research:

Described as 5-foot-7 and of "Mulatto complexion" in Army records, Coffee served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution for a month in 1777 and for another month in 1780.

The welfare records in Medway show that his sprawling family was heavily supported by the town, which sought in 1819 to recoup the money from Needham, his birthplace. Needham responded to the lawsuit, saying it was not responsible for Coffee, who was half-black, because he had violated the law by marrying a white woman. But a judge ruled that Coffee's marriage was valid because it occurred in Rhode Island, where interracial unions were "not unlawful," and Medway won its suit. Other records showed that Coffee's daughter was involved in a similar case involving interracial marriage in 1812.

"The Coffee family's poverty and interracial marriages preserved them for all time in history," said Pierre-Louis, adding that her impression from other indicators is that Ishmael Coffee was a beloved and respected citizen of the town.

A white woman who is acutely aware of race in the country because her husband is Haitian and her three boys biracial, Pierre-Louis was buoyed by the discovery that interracial relationships were more commonplace in the Commonwealth's early history than she had expected.

"It was cool," she said. "To learn the extent that interracial relationships did happen back then was quite extraordinary."

Last week, surrounded by glass-encased artifacts, framed maps, and faded portraits, Pierre-Louis stood before Coffee's descendants, their relatives, and town residents, explaining what she had uncovered about the man.

The response in the cramped room in the Medway Historical Society alternated between laughter and debate.

When Pierre-Louis mentioned that Army records say Coffee "deserted," Boyd quipped, "Sounds like somebody we'd be related to."

But then began the questions: What role does a family's oral history play in her research? Was Ishmael Coffee half-white or half-Native American? Did it matter?

An academic, Pierre-Louis said she typically trusts in "primary source" documents, or official records that were created when the person was alive, and must use them to corroborate her accounts.

Boyd and cousins Carole Jean Palavra, 65, of Harrisville, R.I., and Peter Running Deer Silva, who traveled from Washington to hear Pierre-Louis's talk, countered that official documents can be inaccurate and inconsistent, and shouldn't be regarded as the last word.

They put stock in anecdotal family stories as part of their collected histories, something Pierre-Louis said she doesn't discount, but cannot verify.

Sometimes even their interpretation of documents differed. The only unearthed document mentioning Ishmael Coffee's father, Jupiter, a former slave of African-American and Native American descent who was referred to as "notorious," said he "intermarried with an Indian and a citizen of our town."

Pierre-Louis took that to mean Jupiter Coffee married twice, to a Native American woman and to Ishmael Coffee's mother, whom other records describe as an "English woman." Boyd interpreted it to mean Jupiter Coffee married only once, to a Native American woman, meaning Ishmael Coffee would have been half-African-American and half-Native American.

Neither changed her mind, but each left with an understanding of the other's approach. Both vowed to continue their research.

At the top of the list: What kind of juicy behavior made Jupiter Coffee "notorious?"

Rachana Rathi can be reached at rrathi@globe.com.

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