New Jersey: A Sentence of Survival

Sometimes your family tree data just sits there and stares at you. You can feel it trying to tell you something, but you can't quite hear it.

That's exactly what happened to me when I finally broke through one of the longest-standing brick walls in my own family tree. And what I found on the other side hit me right in the feels. Not because of a dramatic document, or a surprising DNA match, or even a photograph I'd never seen before.

It was a list of names. Seven names. And together, they were a prayer.

From Carrie's Brick Wall to a 300-Year-Old Story

If you've been with me for a while, you know about Carrie. Our Carrie, as my pajamas & pedigrees™ community calls her. Carrie Inman, my two-times-great-grandmother, was the brick wall in my family tree that I thought I would never get past. A little girl orphaned young and raised by her paternal grandparents in Medina County, Ohio. For decades, she was the dead end. She was the place where my family tree just stopped.

And then I found her.

When I finally broke through that wall, I didn't just find another generation. I found a whole new world of family to discover and explore. From Carrie's father's side, I learned about the grandparents who raised her, Isaac Inman and Sally Ann Marsh, and Isaac's own mother, a woman named Elizabeth Lippincott. Elizabeth was born in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, and she and her husband were both raised Quaker.

Here's the thing about Quakers: they keep extraordinary records. Every birth, every marriage, every death, every action taken by their congregations. All of it preserved in meeting minutes going back centuries. And those records became a trail.

I followed that trail from Elizabeth in Ohio back through generations of Lippincotts in New Jersey, until one day I found myself reading about a man born in Devonshire, England, around 1615. A man who, with his wife, crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times. Who survived public excommunication. Who sat in an English jail for saying that Jesus Christ is the Word of God. And who, with his wife, wrote the story of his family's suffering and unshakeable hope in the most remarkable way imaginable — in the names of their children.

Their names were Richard Lippincott and Abigail Goody. And they are my ten-times-great-grandparents.

This is their story.

The Whole Story

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🎧 Listen to the full episode to discover:

• How breaking through Carrie Inman's brick wall led me — ten generations back — to colonial Boston
• The moment in 1651 when Richard Lippincott was publicly excommunicated from the Puritan church for following his conscience
• Why the family crossed the Atlantic Ocean three times — and what Abigail Goody did while her husband was in prison
• The hidden sentence embedded in the names of their seven children, and why I believe it was no accident
• The founding of a Quaker community in Shrewsbury, New Jersey — and the extraordinary guarantee written into its land patent
• Why Abigail Lippincott may be one of the most courageous women I have ever found in a family tree

The Power of One Story

Richard and Abigail's story begins with a young couple in colonial Massachusetts Bay Colony, full of hope, trying to build a new life in the New World. It doesn't stay simple for long.

In the 1640s, Richard's faith began to shift. He was drawn toward what would eventually become the foundation of the Society of Friends — the Quakers — the idea that every person has direct access to God, without a priest or an institution standing between them and the divine. The Puritan church in Boston noticed. And in 1651, they excommunicated him.

Excommunication in 1651 in Boston wasn't a spiritual inconvenience. It was social and economic exile. The church was the government. The community. The civic identity of every person in that colony. Richard had crossed an ocean for religious freedom, and the very people who had done the same thing threw him out for exercising it.

So the family packed up and went back to England. And that's where things got even harder.

They settled in Plymouth, near Richard's ancestral home in Devonshire. They found the Quakers (or the Quakers found them). And by May 1655, after hosting traveling Quaker preachers in his home, RIchard Lippincott was arrested and held in the High Gaol at Exeter Castle alongside Margaret Kellam and Thomas Hooton. Imprisoned for his beliefs. Later, he was imprisoned a second time.

And through all of it, Abigail was at home with the children.

The historical record is full of Richard; his excommunication, his petitions, his name on certificates. But behind every one of those records, there is Abigail. Raising children in the middle of persecution. Attending Quaker meetings every week, even while her husband sat in a cell, even knowing what had happened to other women in their community who had done the same thing. When the mayor of Plymouth summoned the Quaker women and threatened them with prison, Abigail looked him in the eye and said, We are not afraid.

When Richard was finally released from prison the second time, the family made their next decisions. They got back on a ship. A third Atlantic crossing. And this time, they were headed to Rhode Island. But religious tolerance isn’t what they were seeking. They were seeking religious freedom.

So, they moved again. This time to a small patch of land along the Shrewsbury River in East New Jersey, where the founding land patent guaranteed free liberty of conscience without any molestation or disturbance whatsoever in matters of worship.

In Boston, Richard's conscience had been punished with excommunication. In England, it had been punished with prison. In Rhode Island, it was merely tolerated. But in New Jersey it was protected. Written into the founding document. Guaranteed.

It wasn't just where they lived. It was the answer to the prayer they had been writing in their children's names for twenty years.

Remembrance. John. Restore. Freedom. Increase. Jacob. Preserved.

Remember. God is gracious. We were brought back. We are free. We have grown. We have wrestled with God and refused to let go. And through it all? We were preserved.

Your Story

Richard and Abigail's story started as a single name on a death record — Elizabeth Lippincott — who was the great-grandmother of the little girl who was my brick wall. I almost skipped right past her. If I had, I never would have followed the trail. I never would have read the names.

Your family has a trail too. And it's waiting for you to follow it.

You don't need a finished tree to start telling stories. You just need one name, one record, one conversation at Sunday dinner.

Story Seeds 🌱

Plant these conversation starters and watch your family stories grow.

1. For Parents or Grandparents: "Were you named after someone in the family? What do you know about that person? And do you know why they were given their name?" Family naming traditions often carry stories that go back further than anyone realizes.
   
2. For Aunts or Uncles: "Did anyone in our family every choose to follow a different faith tradition or join a different church? How were they treated by the rest of the family? By their community?"
   
3. For Older Relatives: "What's the farthest anyone in our family ever traveled to start a new life? What were they hoping for when they made that move? What were they leaving behind?"
   
   

Story Sparks 🔑

Unlock your family's hidden stories with these research techniques.

1. Follow the religion. When you hit a brick wall, look at your ancestor's religious affiliation. Quakers, Catholics, Mennonites, Moravians, and many other faith communities kept meticulous records that often predate civil registration by centuries. Use the Card Catalog on Ancestry to search for church records by using the keyword field to see what’s available for any given denomination.
   
2. Read the names. When entering children into your family tree, don't just type and move on. Pause and look at the names together. Are there patterns? Repeated names? Unusual names that break from convention? Names that form a sequence? Sometimes the data is speaking. You just have to slow down enough to hear it.
   
3. Search for your ancestors in court, prison, and legal records. These can feel grim, but they are incredibly rich. Use full text search on both Ancestry and FamilySearch to look for your ancestor's name alongside terms like "sessions," "quarter sessions," or the name of the local jail or assize court.
   
4. Look for the women in community records. Abigail Lippincott barely appears in the historical record by name but she shows up in the shape of the family's survival. Look for the women in your tree in petition records, meeting minutes, community documents, and land records tied to their husbands. They are there. You just have to look between the lines.
   

Ready to discover more stories like Richard and Abigail's? Subscribe to Stories That Live In Us wherever you get your podcasts. And if this episode moved you, please leave a rating and review — it helps other family story seekers find their way to us.

© 2026 Crista Cowan. All rights reserved.