“Discover the will of lieutenant gilbert livingston bermuda, plus his family ties, descendants, and where to find the original will.”
Of the five known wills of members of the Livingston family, Gilbert’s is by far the most comprehensive and informative for relationship between the family and Bermuda. I can still recall the exact point at which my genealogy research led me astray, to a tiny pink dot lost far from home in the middle of the Atlantic.
I was three cups of coffee into one of my trusted Livingston family trees, relentlessly hunting down a particular name I kept finding in early colonial New York records, when suddenly the trail disappeared in the most intriguing manner. Instead of bringing me back to Kingston or Poughkeepsie as all my previous lines had done, this one took me to Bermuda. And that’s how I first encountered Lieutenant Gilbert Livingstonand his story, quite frankly, is what got me hooked.
If you’ve arrived here looking for his will, you’re probably in the position I was trying to piece it all together, looking at parish registers, trying to figure out which Gilbert Livingston was meant by it, since there were several men with the same names in this line across the centuries, which is a genealogist’s nightmare, hard to follow. So let’s try to put the pieces together.
Who Was Lieutenant Gilbert Livingston Truly?
Some where I need a stop because this is the kernel where most researchers hit the wall. The most frequently identified Gilbert Livingston to a Bermuda Will is Gilbert Livingston II 1718-1789.
He was the child of Hubertus Livingston “Gilbert” 1746-: 1690-1746 and Cornelia Beekman. Now, it really becomes confusingthere’s also a Gilbert Livingston III 1792 1852, who is the son of Gilbert Livingston II, the progenitor, and who died before his father.
So if the dates aren’t validating a will that you’re reading.. Imagine a family reunion where three cousins all have the same name. Everyone there can tell who is who, and the outsiders would be at a loss even if they knew the namethere would be in jokes sarcasm family myths, and other cues. That’s what happens, to a lesser extent, with records. Names are duplicated, nicknames are swapped for legal names, and the searches become something akin to an inquiry.
Where he went from the United States of America at that time is hard to say. Based solely on the family history accumulated over so many years, Gilbert Livingston II left New York State for Bermuda, in about the year 1743. But per family stories, he was imprisoned in debtor’s prison in New York, until he managed to buy himself out of the situation.
Still, the recollections of family members and some family historians from the USA who have traced family history who have taken an interest in such things, confirms that this is really an unlikely story, and recent detailed research into family history by members of the family who have delved into local records shows a slightly more raised front story.
Per the latest accounts, it would appear that long after the family stories of suicidal wagon rides across America, began circulating, the truth is that Gilbert was captain of a ship, sometime during the American Revolution, which was commissioned to ferry prisoners from Kingston, in the upstate New York area, to Bermuda, in the 1970s.
In 1748 Gilbert married Joy Darrell in the Warwick Parish of Bermuda, and that one act was responsible for tying Gilbert’s entire branch of the family to the island for at least seven generations. Anyone who has ever done genealogy knows that in some ways that is a trivial detail on paper, a name and a date, but it is also a date in time and a decision that altered lives, and whole lines of descendants owe their existence to the sign, seal, or decision that day.
He then joined the American forces during the American Revolution. I don’t think that I ever truly expected him to honestly though I suppose that is a little naive considering that he was still living in a colony of Britain at the time.
A reminder that the divisions were far from always clear or neat. ffandhiskfjffandhisk Gilbert Livingston died on 9 September 1789 in the village of Heron Bay (also known as Heron Bay Village) in Warwick Parish, Bermuda. This is the parish in which he married forty years earlier, indicating that he was really settling down there rather than just ‘touring around’ Bermuda.
And here is the bit that genealogists are most interested in… and if your reading this, is probably the reason you are still here. Because a will isn’t just legal documentation, it’s a record of a whole family on a particular date. It records who is to inherit and shows which family connections are of importance. And it can resolve arguments where pedigrees can’t.
In particular, the search for Gilbert Livingston’s will help to establish who his children were, including his daughter Margaret Livingston born in 1767. This becomes very relevant for descendants of Bermudian ancestors looking to establish a link back to the Livingston family line because the descendants of this child, who seem to have aided the subsequent search of their ancestors for many years following, continue to do so into the present day.
Personally, I have witnessed this on genealogy forums on the internet, where a member of the general public discusses their family history and half-way through the discussion, states simply, ‘I think we’re related’, and within minutes, two lost branches of a family, separated for over 200 years, are reconciling and exchanging notes about their long-lost great-great-great-grandparent.
] That’s the real magic of this kind of research. It’s not dusty old documents and Latin legalese. It’s people finding each other once more.
If what you’re really looking for is the real will, not the biographical info, then your first places to check are the Bermuda Archives, which holds the island’s probate and parish records, as well as major genealogy databases like FamilySearch and Ancestry. It’s also a good idea to ask for the Warwick Parish recordsthe parish where he was married and died. Local genealogical societies in Bermuda can be a treasure trove of resources, since much of the early colonial history on the islands was actually written down in parish registers, rather than in a centralized government archive the way we’re familiar with here on the mainland. A tip that I learned while banging my head against the wall: double-check dates in every record before assuming you have the right document.
With so many Gilberts and Livingstons circulating through several family linessometimes as many as four generations apartit’s depressingly easy to connect the wrong will with the wrong man. I did just that in my own research not too long ago, expanding an entire branch of my family tree based on one wrong file before I realized I had combined two different men into one individual. Weeks of work to fix.
Final Thoughts on This Genealogical Rabbit Hole
Researching a will from the 1700s is usually not a short project, and Lieutenant Gilbert Livingston’s story nicely illustrates that. Really there are many repeated family names, the changing historical accounts describing why he left for New York, and in reality colonial New York is so faraway from Bermuda, make this case just like the ones where patience gets better results than speed. But that’s also the reason why this type of research is so special.
The more you can verify the dates, the more you can connect parish records to your ancestors and the more you can track down your descendants, the bigger the contribution to the solution which has been lying there for over two centuries. If you too are tracing the thread of the Livingston family, I hope that this has helped you to identify the key points and will so give you a few headaches less. It is remarkable how people’s distant cousins can become relatives through family tree research. Perhaps Gilbert and Joy Livingston are one of those distant ancestors that you might still come across someday.
Additional Resources:
- FamilySearch: Bermuda Probate Records
The most authoritative starting point, confirming wills, inventories, and administrations from 1640–1954, with digitized original will images available up to 1913. - National Museum of Bermuda: Genealogy
Offers direct access to decades of research by Bermuda’s foremost genealogist, Clara Hollis Hallett, including notes on related wills.
