What began with a father's line he barely knew became four centuries of documented family — from a Warwickshire christening font in 1582 to a cemetery road in South Princeton, Maine.
What this is
A record of the Wescott and Chadbourne families of Maine — reconstructed from public records and held to a single standard throughout.
It started with what one man knew of his father's people: a name, a grandmother, and a great-grandmother called Thelma Neddeau. Answering that opened the whole tree — up the St. Croix to Princeton and Calais, down the coast to Brooksville and York, across the border into New Brunswick, and eventually back on multiple lines to the 1600s: a millwright on the Pied Cow in 1634, a fisherman they called the King of the Shoals, a lieutenant of Ipswich born in England in 1621, and an Ulster family that came over in 1718 carrying the memory of a siege.
Compiled July 2026 from public records: funeral-home and newspaper obituaries, the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, the VA National Gravesite Locator, the Chadbourne Family Association's 1994 genealogy, published town registers and county histories, Maine's death and marriage indexes, the 1950 federal census, and the records cited line by line in the working files.
The map
A complete chart would seat eight great-grandparents; John has six known — two seats stay empty behind the unknown grandfather. These are the eight deepest documented lines running from those six, back toward the 1600s or to an honest wall. Tap a line to walk it. Generations count upward from the client.
deep & proven three lines reach the 1600s on published or primary records · probable / walled five carry a graded hop or stop at a documented wall. Every wall is named in Honest Walls.
What it adds up to
Weighted by how much each ancestor passes down, the documented tree distilled to one pie — a paper estimate from records, not a DNA test.
The direct thread
The surname spine — with the mechanics said plainly: Mark was born in June 1970, fifteen months before his mother Pamela's marriage, so he carries her maiden name; his biological father was unknown even to him. The Wescott line reaches the present through her, and the record honors her for it.
Going deeper
Five threads that grew large enough to stand on their own.
William Chadbourne was baptized at St. Editha's, Tamworth, Warwickshire, on 30 March 1582. Under contract to Capt. John Mason's Laconia Company, he crossed on the Pied Cow, landing 8 July 1634 — and within the month he and two partners had begun the first water-powered sawmill and gristmill in New England, at the falls the family later gave their name to: the Great Works River was once Chadbournes River. In 1652 he was the first signer of the Kittery Act of Submission.
His son Humphrey (1615–1667) received land from the sagamore Roles in 1643, kept Kittery's town book as clerk from 1650, sat as deputy to the General Court and associate judge — and married Lucy Treworgye, whose 1699 will, still on file, passes the Sturgeon Creek land to her grandson James: a primary record carrying the family across three generations. The client's line runs through that James — thirteen generations from William to now.
Revolution: William⁶ Chadbourne of Cornish (~1760–1827) — "A Revolutionary soldier" in the family genealogy — and Israel Andrews of Machias, 6th Regiment, Lincoln County militia. And one man who saw the war from both sides: see the Thornton affair, below.
Civil War: Charles Everett Wescott of Brooksville served twice — Co. H, 26th Maine Infantry (1862–63), then re-enlisted in Co. L, 2nd Maine Cavalry (1864–66). George W. McDowell of Princeton enlisted in the 11th Maine Infantry at about thirty-nine years old — and lived to ninety-seven.
World War II: Technician Fifth Grade Cecil Brooke Wescott, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division — the division that landed at Utah Beach on D-Day. Cecil was killed on 24 June 1944, eighteen days in, as the 4th fought toward Cherbourg. Bronze Star. Purple Heart. He rests at the Normandy American Cemetery, Colleville-sur-Mer — Plot D, Row 22, Grave 30.
Persian Gulf / Iraq era: Sergeant Mark Edward Wescott, U.S. Army — the client's father — who was last of Fife, Washington, and came home to South Princeton Cemetery, the same ground as his mother, in 2024.
Capt. Matthew Thornton (1746–1824) fought for the Patriots in the 1775 invasion of Canada — then was captured at the Battle of Bennington in 1777 among the Hessians, jailed at Exeter, and indicted for "traitorously levying war" against New Hampshire and the United States. The evidence against him was collected by Capt. Ebenezer Webster — Daniel Webster's father. In September 1779 a jury found him not guilty. He emigrated to "the Ledge" at St. Andrews, New Brunswick, and is buried there.
His father, William Thornton (d. 1790) — first settler of Dublin, New Hampshire — was the brother of Hon. Matthew Thornton, signer of the Declaration of Independence for New Hampshire. Said precisely: the client descends from the signer's brother — the signer is a collateral relative, not a direct ancestor. (New Brunswick tradition long claimed the Ledge's Capt. Matthew was the signer; that is refuted — the signer died in New Hampshire in 1803.) The family came from Ulster in 1718, carrying a tradition of having lived through the Siege of Londonderry in 1689.
Hop grades: the Sprague generations are record-proven; Jane (Thornton) Sprague's parentage and Capt. Matthew's are probable per the 1905 Thornton family genealogy; the brother-of-the-signer fact is confirmed in two independent works.
The original 1905 marriage return of James E. Neddeau, preserved by the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, names his parents: Louis & Mary Neddeau. Louis — a mason of Princeton, recorded across the censuses as Nadeau, Neddean, Neddo, Nedeau — reported his father born in France and his mother in New Brunswick. The rare "Neddeau" spelling is an anglicization of NADEAU, one of the great Acadian and French-Canadian surnames, worn down at the border within a generation or two.
And the verification pass found a second Franco thread where no one expected one: on the maternal side, the client's great-great-grandmother was probably born Hilda Croteau (m. Albert F. Hanson, Auburn, 1925) — a shoe-factory stitcher married to a Portland cobbler.
This family remembers with names. Azariah Boody Chadbourne (1818) carried his mother's father whole. Nathan Spinney Chadbourne (1791) carried his grandmother Susanna Spinney. Matthew Thornton Sprague (1798) carried his mother's father the captain. When Earl Chadbourne's sister Gladys Arlene died in 1953, he named his next daughter — born 1954 — Gladys Arlene.
And the deepest one: Everett S. “Smut” Wescott — himself a namesake, grandson of both Charles Everett Wescott, the Civil War soldier, and Everett Douglass — died in Bangor on 23 June 1970, three weeks after his grandson Mark was born. Pamela kept the Wescott name on her son; Mark carried it through the Army and home to South Princeton; and the client gave his own son the name Everett — four generations on from Smut, a name in the family since the 1840s: a middle name first, then a given name when one boy could honor two grandfathers at once. The record and the family memory agree exactly.
The record can hold the whole world around a mystery without guessing at its answer. In 1969, Pamela’s world was this: a 956-person town whose only high school had just graduated its final class — hers. A family newly returned to Princeton after twenty-five years in New Jersey (Rahway, then Woodbridge — her sister Carol graduated high school there in 1961), which made Pamela a near-stranger in her own mother’s hometown, back barely two years. A father entering his last year — Everett died in Bangor the June following, three weeks after Mark was born. And ten miles south, the mill town of Woodland, more than twice Princeton’s size, where the Georgia-Pacific paper mill anchored the region’s work and where Princeton’s young people now orbited after their school closed.
Somewhere in that small, knowable world is the answer to the record’s one blank quarter. This page does not guess — but a private research packet delivered with this report maps that world in full: the town, the year, the records that survive, and the exact steps that would answer the question, whenever the family chooses to ask it.
Kept because the record is the record
Five places the record stops — named plainly, each with the document that would move it.
How it was done
Three research phases; every load-bearing link then attacked by an adversarial verification pass built to refute it.
The anchor generations were rebuilt from published obituaries — a mother's, a grandmother's, a great-grandmother's — each naming the next generation up. The brick walls fell to primary records: an original 1905 marriage return in the New Brunswick archives that names two sets of parents on one page; a town death register at Brooksville; the VA's own gravesite database; a marriage index entry from 1953 cross-locked by a sister's from 1958. The deep lines run on published genealogies and town registers, graded hop by hop, with every same-name decoy that was checked and excluded recorded in the working files so no future researcher re-merges them.
Key sources: Mays Funeral Home (Calais) and Calais Advertiser obituaries · Provincial Archives of New Brunswick RS141B7 · VA National Gravesite Locator · "The Chadbourne Family in America" (CFA, 1994) and chadbourne.org · Stackpole, "Old Kittery and Her Families" (1903) · Wheeler, "History of Castine, Penobscot and Brooksville" (1875) · Adams, "The Family of James Thornton" (1905) · the published Machias town records · Maine death index 1956–2009 & marriage index 1892–1966 · U.S. Census 1950 (NARA) · interment.net Normandy American Cemetery records · WikiTree & FamilySearch record citations · Find a Grave.