George Bubb Eesley

George Bubb Eesley was a son of John Eesley and Susannah Bubb, born 1836 in Warwickshire — the older brother by a year of Albert Robert Eesley, the Canadian emigrant whose line runs through Chuck. Like his brother George E. Eesley further down the family (Albert Robert’s grandson, who would die in 1942), he carried his mother’s maiden name Bubb as his middle name in the old English custom — the same way one of his siblings was Albert Robert and another William.

The U.S.S. Constitution chaplain story

Mary Eesley Bean’s 1985 family history preserves the one story this archive has about him:

He was the last surviving member of the crew of the ship “Constitution”. He was retired as a Chaplain of the navy, though not a minister, he conducted services aboard ship.

The U.S.S. Constitution — “Old Ironsides” — is the most famous ship in the U.S. Navy, launched at Edmund Hartt’s Boston shipyard in 1797 under the Naval Act of 1794 and still in commission today as the world’s oldest commissioned warship still afloat. She is permanently berthed at the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston and is operated by the U.S. Navy as a ceremonial ship and museum.

For George Bubb Eesley to have been “the last surviving member of the crew” at some point in his life would place his Constitution service in the mid-to-late 19th century — when she was still an active U.S. Navy training ship (1860 onward) and Indian-Ocean fleet vessel (1860s receiving ship). The Naval Chaplain Corps had been formally organized in 1860, and an enlisted sailor who conducted services aboard ship without being an ordained minister was a common informal arrangement before and after that date. Bean’s phrasing — “a Chaplain of the navy, though not a minister, he conducted services aboard ship” — reads as a sailor whose religious-services duty earned him the chaplain title without formal ordination.

The “last surviving member of the crew” detail would have been a moment of late-life public recognition for him — Constitution crew members of the 1860s and 1870s were regularly named in obituaries and Navy registries as the count thinned. The detail is what Bean would have known about him as the family pieced together their record decades later.

Open

• The wife details — Bean records two marriages: a first wife not named in the register, and a second wife Anna. No children are listed in Bean’s seven-children compression of the John-and-Hannah line.
• The years of his Navy service — if he was a U.S.S. Constitution sailor in the 1850s, 1860s, or 1870s, the U.S. Naval Archives’ enlisted muster rolls and the USS Constitution Museum records would identify him by name.
• His death year and place — not in the GEDCOM. Likely New Jersey (where his parents had settled in 1858) or New York (where the Navy was administered), in the late 19th or early 20th century.

A Constitution crewman in the Eesley family — on the same paternal line that produced the journeyman millers, the Canadian emigrant, the Plainwell flour-mill founder, and Chuck’s grandfather Will the architect — is the kind of detail that turns the line’s New-World story from a single trade into a much wider American narrative.

Sources: Mary Eesley Bean, Eesley Family History, 1985 (page 1a); Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — George Bubb Eesley (LB42-T6L) (verify FS ID).