| Battle: | Battle of Dunbar in Dunbar, East Lothian, Scotland |
| Ship/Arrival: | Unity, Dec 1650 |
| Prisoner and List: | |
| Name Variations: | |
| Residences: | |
| Other SPOW Associations: |
Published: 16 Dec 2014, Updated: 21 Aug 2018
Page contributors: Dr. Andrew Millard, Teresa Rust
Daniel Elder, #20 on George S. Stewart’s Captured at Dunbar list
IMPORTANT UPDATE! (July 2018)
According to, Christopher Gerrard, Pam Graves, Andrew Millard, Richard Annis, and Anwen Caffell, Lost Lives, New Voices: Unlocking the Stories of the Scottish Soldiers at the Battle of Dunbar 1650, (England: Oxbow Books, 2018), on page 249, Daniel is categorized as:
Probable [that he is a Dunbar prisoner transported on the Unity]
Elder/Elyer, Daniel. Residences: Dorchester, Sudbury MA. Appears: 1662. B.c.1634. D.1692. Explicitly attested as Scot and appears at the appropriate time. [Exiles; DR; SPOWS; Ch.8]
For explanations of the category, abbreviations and references see List of Dunbar prisoners from Lost Lives, New Voices.
Find his descendants and researchers here.
First Generation in the New World
1. DANIEL¹ ELDER, was born in Scotland and died at Dorchester on 4 May 1692. He married at Dorchester, Massachusetts on 12 March 1666 by Captain Clap, LYDIA HOMES.
SOURCES AND NOTES:
“Daniel Elder Scotsman was Married unto Lydia Homes by Capt. Clap the 12th. day of the (1 mo:) 1666/7.” The first month on the old calendar was MARCH, not JANUARY!
Daniel married Lydia Homes 12 Jan 1666/7 by Captain Clap at Dorchester. (Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850, Dorchester, Vol 1., p21)
Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699
By Roger Thompson
Page 106:
The age-old antipathy between English and Scots broke out into war in 1649.(53) By 1652 over five hundred Scottish prisoners of war from Dunbar and Worcester had been transported as servants to Massachusetts Bay. By 1680 only some one hundred twenty remained.(54) During the 1650’s they certainly made their presence felt, but as much for their savage violence as their sexual indiscipline. Thus James Ross, the father of Mary Goodenow’s bastard, had received heavy punishment of thirty-nine stripes for “shamefull abuse and violence towards his master.”(55) Others were presented for cruelty to the bastard of a fellow-countryman or for “uncomfortable carriages…towards his wife…bitter words from day to day [making it] very hazardous to live together.”(56) They often had to make do with disreputable women: an Irish pilferer and slattern, (57) the whorish Jane Bowen,(58) the repeater Sarah Dawes,(59) or an unrequited wife.(60) When the impudent Daniel Elder sought “irregularly to draw away affections of deacon’s daughter, the court put him firmly in his place.”(61)
After eleven sexual offenses between 1655 and 1665, Scottish names appear far less frequently in the records.(62) It is probable that many returned home after the restoration in 1660; others may have migrated to the Connecticut Valley.(63) Those who remained were then New Englanders by choice, and seemed to have integrated into the culture. Their enforced residence during the 1650’s comes through from the records as the presence of a very different culture whose violent impact was marked but extremely short-lived.