I’m having some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (#SNGF), with help from Randy Seaver and his prompts! Feel free to join in.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: June 27, 2026

Prompt: “We all have ancestors who were alive in 1776, and some of them may have celebrated the signing of the Declaration of Independence or even served in the military during the War. Describe one or more of your ancestors who lived in that time or served in the military.”

Introduction

I am so lucky that my ancestor Henry Denny lived long enough to apply for a pension for his Revolutionary War service. Not long enough to collect it, but the paperwork exists.

Discussion

The pension files corroborate these stories through witness accounts, but they do not give exact dates for each event. So I am treating 1776 as a doorway into Henry Denny’s Revolutionary War experience rather than as a claim that these particular moments happened in that year.

Henry Denny served with the Bergen County, New Jersey militia under Captain Outwater.

Here’s a really interesting story from his pension files:

Henry Denny once had a direct encounter with a Hessian rifleman. In the fullest account, Henry was wounded by a Hessian rifleman and then captured a Hessian rifleman who had been accompanied by a drummer; unable to take both men, Henry kept the rifleman as prisoner while the drummer got away. A later witness remembered the story more simply as Henry having shot a Hessian.

A second story concerns the effort to save Hackensack from being burned.

The service narrative says Henry was part of a firing or scouting party when a large number of “refugees,” as the file describes them, were coming up to set fire to Hackensack. The party went about a mile below Hackensack, met them, and fired on them. The enemy then came far enough to see the town “well lighted up,” but did not fire a musket at the town; instead, they “blew their bugle and wheeled about,” leaving the town to be enjoyed by the inhabitants.

That story also connects with later affidavits saying Henry was in skirmishes around Hackensack, that the courthouse was burned, and that Henry was wounded in service.

Henry Denny was part of the militia, but that does not mean he saw no action. On the contrary, his family, his neighbors, and his home depended on the actions of Henry and his militia brothers. Whether or not these particular events happened in 1776, they belong firmly to the Revolutionary War world the prompt asks us to remember.

AI Disclosure

This post was created by me with the help of AI tools. While AI helps organize research, the storytelling and discoveries are my own.