We might recount at this point the number of children in the seven Burgess generations in the direct line from the first Thomas to Peleg. First Thomas 5 plus others Second Thomas 1 Third Thomas 13 Nathaniel 11 John 12 Phineas 6 Peleg 8 -- 56 This is an average of eight children per generation. I have had conversations with Mary Burgess, then aged 87, about her recollections about her grandparents’ life at the Pond. She remembers more of her grandmother Charlotte, being 18 at the time of her death in 1903, and also because she lived her last years in the Plymouth home of her son, Peleg. She said her grandparents were dedicated abolitionists before the Civil War, Charlotte in particular. There had been centers of such activity on North Street and on Clark’s Island. They had local black people working at the homestead for helping with the crops and the growing of all sorts of berries, such as raspberries and strawberries for sale in the markets. Each summer Indians from farther south at the Cape came to South Pond and lived out in the vicinity of Pinnacle Hill across the Pond. They would travel by canoe to work by day. Some of the activities for the Indian women included spinning and weaving on looms in the attic for making cloth and related items. They had good numbers of sheep for the purpose. In the spring upon arrival the Indians would bring quantities of herring from the spawning in fresh water streams for gifts to the family. The Indians in the area at the time of the arrival of the settlers belonged to the Wampanoag tribe, a member of the group designated as Algonquins. She said the Indians buried in graves in South Pond cemetery had presumably died from small pox epidemics. She told me about her grandparents. They lived in Middleboro at an early time in their marriage. Phineas was a member of the Middleboro School Committee; Charlotte was a school teacher. They had a young girl as a servant who grew up in the family, probably in the 1850’s. She learned from the other family children ways in which to be productive and self-reliant, such as weaving cloth from wool, making her own clothes, learning to read and write and the like. The girl, at the time of the Civil War, made herself a soldier’s uniform, posed as a male, enlisted, and served during the war. Afterward she got married and lived in Middleboro. Mary Burgess has told me that she thinks the “bounded servant,” as she refers to her, was named Deborah Sampson. Raising other people’s children in one’s family was not an uncommon custom. The reason for its prevalence is explored in an extended account of the whole custom in the John Demos book, _A Little Commonwealth_. The term “servant” as we now understand it is not an accurate indication of what took place from the early days of the Colony well into the early part of the nineteenth century.