Barclays of New York

Rev, Thomas Barclay of Albany. in
Justice, b 19 April, 1747; d 14 December, 1799. They
had no issue. Frederick Jay survived his wife and
subsequently married Euphemia Dunscomb, but left no
issue.
19. Helena Barclay,^ d 22 April, 1775; m 16 June, 1774,* 1
Major Thomas Moncrieffe, d 10 December, 1791. 42
(83) Thomas Barclay Moncrieffe^ b April, 1775 j 42
d 18 June, 1807, 43 unm.
^From Rivington's New York Gazetteer of Thursday, 16 June, 1774:
"This morning was married at her father's house in Wall Street, by the Rev.
Mr. Charles Inglis, Thomas Moncrieffe, Esq. (Major of Brigade upon the American
Establishment), to the very amiable Miss Helena Barclay, fifth daughter of Mr.
Andrew Barclay, an eminent Merchant of this City. Immediately after the ceremony
they sat out for their country retirement, on Long Island."
* 2 From the New York Weekly Journal of Wednesday, 14 December, 1791:
"Died : On Friday last, suddenly, by the bursting of a blood vessel, Thomas
Moncrieffe, Esq., late Major in the British service; and on Sunday evening his
remains were interred in Trinity Church Yard, attended by a great number of re-
spectable citizens."
Among the bound pamphlets in the library of the New York Historical Society,
is an extremely well written and unusually interesting one entitled Memoirs of Mrs.
Coghlan, New York: T. & J. Swords, 1795. The writer, Margaret Coghlan, was the
daughter of Major Moncrieffe by a former wife; and in these Memoirs, written at the
age of but thirty-three, she tells of the life, crowded to overflowing with unusual
incident even for the days of the Revolution, of a spirited girl who was forced by
the iron wills of her father and brother, when but fourteen years of age, to marry a
man, Lieut. John Coghlan, whom she abhorred and despised. The particular interest
of the Memoirs in connection with the Barclay descent is the tribute paid by Mrs.
Coghlan to her father's third wife, Helena Barclay.
The father's first marriage was to Margaret Heron, a daughter of the Governor
of Annapolis Royal, who was a wife at fourteen and in her grave before she was
twenty, leaving two children surviving her, Edward Cornwallis Moncrieffe and
Margaret Moncrieffe, the writer of the Memoirs. In 1765, when the brother was
five and the sister but three, they were sent by their father to Dublin to be educated,
and there they remained until 1772. On October 10, 1764, hardly a year after his
first wife's death, Major Moncrieffe had married Polly Livingston, a daughter of
Judge Livingston of New York; and in 1770 he came to Dublin with his regiment,
the 55th, and brought his wife with him. "The person of this lady," writes Mrs.
Coghlan, "was uncommonly forbidding, but her purse was irresistible. Young as I
was, I did not like my new mother. She had, as I above remarked, the most dis-
agreeable countenance, and, what is worse, she was a stranger to every social virtue
and a rigid Presbyterian."
In 1772, the brother and sister returned to New York. The former entered
Kings College, while the latter remained under the care of a governess. In January,
1774, their stepmother died childless, at the age of thirty-four, leaving her fortune
to her husband, "for in her marriage articles," writes Mrs. Coghlan, "she had reserved
to herself the power of disposing of it."
Less than six months after his second wife's death, Mrs. Coghlan continues, her
father took to himself another wife, "one of the lovliest of her sex" (Helena Bar-
clay). "In her bosom virtue, honour and conjugal affection were blended; but alasl