Author: Smith, Richard Ransom
Biography:
SMITH, Richard Ransom (1773-1866: ancestry.com)
pseudonym Redemptio
He was born in Lyme CT, one of several children of Irena and Stephen Smith. The family purchased land and settled in Woodstock VT in 1782. They were Baptists. Three of the sons became preachers of different persuasions. Richard was ordained as a Baptist minister in Conway NH about 1793; though his views changed and he embraced Universalism, he continued as an itinerant preacher. He married Sarah (Sally) Cummings in 1796 and they had at least one son, Jerome Van Crowninshield Smith (1800-79), who became an eminent physician and mayor of Boston. About 1800 he retrained as a silversmith with a shop in South Woodstock VT; his pious Flying Roll and a short prose pamphlet, Retrospect (1806), belong to this period. Smith developed cancer and went to Canada for treatment; on his return, he marketed the remedy that had cured him but at the same time acquired medical training good enough to set him up as a "respectable physician" (Loring) in Boston from 1816 onward. He died in Boston. (ancestry.com 27 Sept. 2020; findmypast.com 27 Sept. 2020; Henry Swan Dana, History of Woodstock, Vermont [1889] 131-2; James Spear Loring, The Hundred Boston Orators [1854] 451)