Tarbell - Mohawks
On 20 June 1707, during Queen Anne's War, three children of Thomas and Elizabeth Woods Tarbell were taken captive in a raid on Groton, MA by Abenaki and French, and taken to Canada to Montreal and Kahnawake, a Catholic Mohawk mission community near Montreal. During these years, raiding between Canadian and New England communities was frequent, and the Abenaki made money from ransoms paid.
The two younger Tarbell children, John (b. 1695) and Zachariah/Zachary (b. 1699-1700), then 12 and 8, respectively, were adopted into Mohawk families and became totally assimilated, taking Catholic and Mohawk names, and marrying Mohawk women and becoming chiefs as adults. They are the ancestors of the Mohawk Tarbell families.
In the 1750s the Tarbell brothers and several other families founded a new Mohawk community upriver, at what they called Akwesasne. Both of these communities still exist on the St. Lawrence River as Mohawk reserves; Akwesasne's territory crosses the river and includes land in NY state, and the provinces of Quebec and Ontario.
The oldest, Sarah, 14 (b. 1693), was ransomed by a French family. After a year she converted to Catholicism and was named Marguerite. She joined the Congregation of Notre Dame, founded by a French woman in Montreal in 1657, and likely worked as a teacher. It was a teaching and nursing order that founded schools and a hospital in Montreal. See {Darren Bonaparte, “The First Families of Akwesasne”, ‘’The People’s Voice’’, 15 Apr 2005, www.wampumchronicles)
Reaghan Tarbell, a contemporary Mohawk from Kahnesake, made a wonderful documentary which was shown on PBS in the fall of 2009: "To Brooklyn and Back: A Mohawk Journey", about her grandmother and mother's generation in the first half of the 20th century. They accompanied their husbands to NYC, where the men went as ironworkers and builders of the skyscrapers and bridges. She credits the women with creating a Mohawk community for their families in Brooklyn, calling their neighborhood "Little Kahnewake", as most came from their community on the St. Lawrence River, and would return there in summers.