One of her grandsons, Eleazer Williams, turned Protestant, was educated at Dartmouth College at the charge of friends in New England, and was for a time missionary to the Indians of Green Bay, in Wisconsin. His character for veracity was not of the best. He deceived the excellent antiquarian, Hoyt, by various inventions touching the attack on Deerfield, and in the latter part of his life tried to pass himself off as the lost Dauphin, son of Louis XVI.[74] Here it may be observed that the descendants of young captives brought into Canada by the mission Indians during the various wars with the English colonies became a considerable element in the Canadian population. Perhaps the most prominent example is that of the Gill family. In June, 1697, a boy named Samuel Gill, then in his tenth year, was captured by the Abenakis at Salisbury in Massachusetts, carried to St. Francis, and converted. Some years later he married a young English girl, said to have been named James, and to have been captured at Kennebunk.[75] In 1866 the late Abbe Maurault, missionary at St. Francis, computed their descendants at nine hundred and fifty-two, in whose veins French, English, and Abenaki blood were mixed in every conceivable proportion. He gives the tables of genealogy in full, and says that two hundred and thirteen of this prolific race still bear the surname of Gill. "If," concludes the worthy priest, "one should trace out all the English families brought into Canada by the Abenakis, one would be astonished at the number of persons who to-day are indebted to these savages for the blessing of being Catholics and the advantage of being Canadians,"[76]--an advantage for which French-Canadians are so ungrateful that they migrate to the United States by myriads. FOOTNOTES: [53] _Vaudreuil au Ministre, 14 Novembre, 1703_; _Ibid., 3 Avril, 1704_; _Vaudreuil et Beauharnois au Ministre 17 Novembre, 1704_. French writers say that the English surprised and killed some of the Abenakis, who thereupon asked help from Canada. This perhaps refers to the expeditions of Colonel March and Captain Tyng, who, after the bloody attacks upon the settlements of Maine, made reprisal upon Abenaki camps. [54] English accounts make the whole number 342. [55] Stephen W. Williams, _Biographical Memoir of Rev. John Williams_. [56] _Account of ye destruction at Derefd, February 29, 1703/4._ [57] Papers in the Archives of Massachusetts. Among these, a letter of Rev. John Williams to the governor, 21 October, 1703, states that the palisade is rotten, and must be rebuilt. [58] The names of nearly all the inhabitants are preserved, and even the ages of most of them have been ascertained, through the indefatigable research of Mr. George Sheldon, of Deerfield, among contemporary records. The house of Thomas French, the town clerk, was not destroyed, and his papers were saved.