My Loyalist Ancestors - Benjamin Thompson AKA Count Rumford

 

The Count Rumford birthplace in Woburn, Massachusetts

This is the second blog post on a Loyalist ancestor I have written this year for the 250th anniversary of the United States.  Benjamin Thompson is my first cousin, six generations removed.  His mother, Ruth Simonds (b. 1730) is the sister of my 5th great grandfather, Caleb Simonds (1720 - 1811).  Benjamin Thompson was born 26 March 1753 in Woburn, Massachusetts in the house of his grandfather, Captain Ebenezer Thompson.  He attended the local schools until he was eleven years old, when he was sent (along with his young friend and neighbor Loammi Baldwin) to Medford to study mathematics, astronomy and science.  

At age 13 he was bound as an apprentice to a Salem merchant, John Appleton.  Thompson went home to Woburn soon after because Appleton lost his business when the relations between the colonies and England became strained. Then he taught school in Wilmington in 1768 and 1769.  Later in 1769 he again studied science (anatomy and physiology) under Dr. John Hay, a doctor in Woburn. In 1770 he studied at Harvard with his friend Loammi Baldwin.  In 1772 he began to teach school in Rumford (now Concord, New Hampshire). 

By 1772 he married Sarah Walker, the widow of Benjamin Rolfe, and daughter of Rev. Timothy Walker of Rumford. She was a very wealthy woman, age 33, and Benjamin Thompson was only 19 years old. He joined the New Hampshire regiment, and had to chose sides to be an American or a Loyalist.  When he was denied a commission to be an officer in the Continental army he joined the British. Benjamin and Sarah had one daughter, Sarah, born 18 October 1774. 

When the British evacuated Boston on 17 March 1776 he fled to England and left his wife in New Hampshire. He was elected to the Royal Society of Science in 1779, returned to America as an officer in 1781 - 1782, and was knighted in 1784.  Then he left England for Germany, where he served the Prince of Bavaria for 18 years, where he was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire. He chose to be named Count Rumford, after the town in New Hampshire.

In 1803 he settled in France where he remarried to the widow of the French chemist Lavoisier.  His new wife was Anne Marie Pierette Paulze. While in France he invented a calorimeter, a photomete, and a drip coffee maker.  His studies of heat lead him to be the first to understand that heat was a form of motion.

He endowed the Rumford Medals at the Royal Society, and the Rumford Medals at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Rumfor chair of science at Harvard College (now Harvard University). He, along with Sir Joseph Banks, founded the Royal Institution of Great Britain.  He also made some practical inventions such as central heating, the smokeless chimney, the kitchen oven, the first pressure cooker, and other. His name lives on for the invention of the Rumford Fireplace, which reflected more heat back into the room than previous versions of fireplaces. 

As Count Rumford in Europe, he had several love affairs, including a woman Victoire Lafevre (his housekeeper) who bore him a son,  and the Countess Baumgarten with whom he had another daughter named Sophia, born in 1798.  Count Rumford also had an affair with her sister, the Countess Nogarola.  

Benjamin Thompson, AKA Count Rumford, died 21 August 1814 in Auteil, France and is buried there. His epitaph reads "Benjamin Thompson, Conte De Rumford. The celebrated physicist and enlightened philanthropist, whose discoveries on light and heat made his name illustrious and whose work to help the poor will always be dear to the friends of humanity."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was "one of the three greatest minds America has produced" (the others were Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson).  

By Thomas Gainsborough - Corel Photo CD, MASTERS I, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9516763

For the truly curious:

Previous blog posts on Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford:

"Two Cousins", 17 May 2012:  https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/05/two-cousins.html   

"The Count Rumford House", 14 May 2012:   https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/05/count-rumford-house.html   

"Colonel Loammi Baldwin", 24 October 2013:   https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/10/colonel-loammi-baldwin.html  

Memoir of Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, with notices of his daughter, (with an edition of Rumford's complete works) by George E. Ellis, published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston, 1875. 

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford and the Royal Instituation, by the Royal Society, 1999. 

White Knight, Red Heat: The many lives of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, by John and Mary Gribbin, 20023

Benjamin Thompson at Wikipedia:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Thompson 

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To cite/link to this blog post: Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "My Loyalist Ancestors - Benjamin Thompson AKA Count Rumford", Nutfield Genealogy, posted September 15, 2026, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2026/09/my-loyalist-ancestors-benjamin-thompson.html: accessed [access date]). 

Science Cafe NH - A Conversation about DNA and Forensic Genealogy

Panelists at the Science Cafe event, March 27th, in Concord, NH
Left to right, Buzz Scherr, Kim Rumrill, and Beth Wilkes

Every month there are several Science Cafe events around the state of New Hampshire.  Although I have been reading Dave Brooks as "The Granite Geek" in his science column in the Concord Monitor, I hadn't paid attention to these gatherings. Then I saw this event on Facebook for the March 27th event in Concord for "How Forensic Genealogy is Cracking Decades Old Cold Cases" and I jumped at the chance to attend.  Vincent, the science buff (and MIT graduate) was interested in the topic, too.

Vincent and I arrived just in time to grab the last seats at a table at Makris restaurant, where the Science Cafe is now meeting every fourth Wednesday of the month. After we were seated, a few more chairs were brought out and squeezed into corners, and a half dozen people stood along the walls, and about 15 people were turned away.  According to Dave Brooks, who was the moderator for this night's panel discussion, said that he had never anticipated such a large crowd. There were over 90 in this dining room.

Forensic DNA, as well as DNA in general, has made genealogy and genealogy websites very popular in the last few years.  The constant commercials on TV for DNA testing, as well as several very infamous crime cases on the news media have made DNA intriguing to the general public. This is probably why so many people turned up for this particular Science Cafe event.  However, most of the general public still doesn't understand how DNA works, and how the ethics of these cases has changed crime fighting and privacy issues.

Since this was a "Science Cafe", the panel members were not genealogists, even though the word "genealogy" was prominent in the title of the event.  Milli Knudsen, who was the forensic genealogist for the New Hampshire state police on the Bear Brook case, or other forensic genealogists, were not on this panel. The panelists chosen for this night were Buzz Scherr, from the UNH School of Law, an expert on genetic laws and privacy (he penned last year's legislation for privacy which passed by 80% on the NH ballot); Kimberly Rumrill, a criminalist with the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory; and Beth Wilkes, a professor of genetics at NHTI.

The questions posed from the audience to the panel were very interesting, and they also showed that members of the audience had varying degrees of knowledge on the subject of DNA.  The very first question posed was from an audience member who wanted to know the ethics of Ancestry selling his DNA to insurance companies (answer: they are not selling his information to insurance companies).  The second question was about CRISPR and gene editing, a more advanced topic.  Another audience member had a question about the Bear Brook mystery (for people outside of New Hampshire - this was a cold case about several bodies found buried in steel barrels on the grounds of Bear Brook State Park in Allenstown.  The case was solved using DNA and genealogy - see the link below for a podcast about the case, or Google "Bear Brook Case" for news stories).

One audience member wanted to know if our DNA is 99.9% identical (between any two humans), how could the differences point out a suspect in a crime case?  This is where the panel could have used an actual forensic genealogist.  Although the panelists explained how certain markers are examined for mutations and differences in the code, they didn't know which commercial DNA companies (Ancestry, 23andMe, GEDmatch were mentioned) used Y or mtDNA (none of them, only FamilyTreeDNA does the paternal or maternal testing).  They didn't know how to explain triangulation, or centimorgans, DNA Painter, Ancestry Thrulines, or any of the other methods genealogists use to find family members (cousin connections).  Genealogists were mentioned, especially Parabon Nano-Labs in the context of being part of the team to help solve the crimes.

The panel was excellent at explaining the ethical problems in criminal cases, and in explaining the science of genes, chromosomes, phenotyping, etc.  Vincent, although he was an MIT graduate, was glad he had already learned about genetic DNA at RootsTech, the Southern California Genealogy Society Jamboree, NERGC, and from genealogy speakers like Judy Russell and Blaine Bettinger.  Although this is a science topic, it crosses over into law, ethics, government and other disciplines.

Vincent and I were intrigued enough by this event to put some of the other Science Cafe, NH programs on our calendar.  There are Science Cafe events in Manchester (SEE Science Center's Science on Tap), Portsmouth, Nashua, Holderness (hosted by the Squam Lake Association), and Lebanon (hosted by Dartmouth College).  The Nashua Science Cafe is held at the Riverwalk Cafe at 6pm on the second Wednesday of each month.  The Concord Science Cafe is held at Makris Lobster and Steak Restaurant at 6pm on the fourth Wednesday of the month.  Dave Brooks joked that per capita, New Hampshire has more Science Cafe's than any other state.  Considering that we are such a tiny state with a tiny population, maybe he is right!

Look for this show on Concord TV in a week or two (also will air in several other communities in New Hampshire and nation wide)  https://www.yourconcordtv.org/projects/science-cafe-concord/ 

If you are interested in DNA and genetic genealogy, don't forget that in two weeks the New England Regional Genealogy Conference (NERGC 2019) will be in Manchester, New Hampshire April 3 - 6, 2019 at the Double Tree Hotel on Elm Street  http://www.nergc.org/  .  Genetic DNA is so popular right now, that Blaine Bettinger's pre conference DNA day on Wednesday April 3rd has sold out.  You can still follow the DNA track of workshops, lectures and presentations on April 4, 5, and 6 (attend all three days, or just one or two days).  See the conference brochure with a schedule of all the events, including DNA and genetic genealogy at this link: http://www.nergc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/NERGC-2019.pdf 

Science Cafe, NH on Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/sciencecafenh/

The Science Cafe, NH website  http://sciencecafenh.org/ 

New Hampshire Public Radio's podcast on the Bear Brook Cold Case, solved using forensic genealogy:  https://www.bearbrookpodcast.com/ 

NERGC 2019 (New England Regional Genealogy Conference April 3-6)  http://www.nergc.org/

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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Science Cafe NH - A Conversation about DNA and Forensic Genealogy", Nutfield Genealogy, posted 28 March 2019, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2019/03/science-cafe-nh-conversation-about-dna.html: accessed [access date]).