Batchelder/Bachilder Genealogy Through Rev. Stephen Bachiler’s Son Stephen Bachilder

Charles Hull Batchelder was born in Portsmouth, NH on May 12, 1876, the son of Judge Charles Edwin Batchelder. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College in 1897 and from Harvard Law School in 1900. After being admitted to the bar he returned to Portsmouth where he practiced law for 48 years until his death in 1948. He had a lifelong interest in genealogy, including that of his forefathers, the Batchelder family of Hampton, beginning with the Rev. Stephen Bachiler, the colorful founder of Hampton. He spent many years conducting extensive research into the family in the hope of someday publishing a revised genealogy, to correct the extensive errors he found in the 1898 Batchelder genealogy published by Frederick C. Pierce. Charles Batchelder died before he could publish his work, but his research is currently available at the New Hampshire Historical Society library in Concord, NH. It consists of eleven records storage boxes that contain the following: 196 handwritten notebooks in five boxes, handwritten and typed correspondence in four boxes, about 2000 handwritten family group sheets in one box, and about 10,000 individual handwritten index cards in one box. These index cards represent a card file system that Charles kept on the individuals in his records. His original records include transcriptions of various original source materials such as census records and deeds, as well as a large collection of family group sheets. The original card file index is arranged in six sections: Batchelder males with numbers Batchelder males in the S & R index, whose numbers begin with an S or R Batchelder Females Women who married Batchelder males in the first section Women who married Batchelder males in the S & R section Miscellaneous men and women In 2002, prolific indexers Norton R. Bagley and Michael O. Vacca created a printed index to this material, which is also available at the Historical Society. They tried to include all of the material apearing on each card, which generally include dates and places. They changed only the abbreviations for the states in most instances, bringing them up-to-date with modern usage. Comparisons of the printed index to the original file box will show some copy errors, so users should beware and consult the original manuscripts when an apparent subject of interest is found. In 1985, local genealogist Carl W. Brage transcribed large portions of Charles Batchelder's handwritten notebooks and made them available in a 222-page indexed typescript that he made available to a few libraries, including the Portsmouth Athenaeum, The New England Historic Genealogical Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the Allen County (Indiana) Public Library, the DAR Library in Washington, DC, the Genealogical Society of Utah, the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, and the Lane Memorial Library of Hampton. For years this work has languished in obscurity, unknown to most Batchelder researchers who continue to regard the 1898 Pierce book as the only published work on the family. The library incorporated the details of names, dates, places, and relationships into its massive online genealogical database of Hampton families, which helped to get this valuable information to a wider audience. In 2005 Mr. Brage kindly gave the Lane Memorial Library the rights to distribute his work however we saw fit. We wanted to make it available to the widest possible audience, so with the help of volunteer David Johnson of Dallas, Texas, the entire typescript was scanned into pdf format and is now made available for free download from this web page.