Ancestors

Alice Rambo

Alice Rambo was born about 1748, one of the five daughters of John Rambo, a yeoman of Providence Township on the Perkiomen Creek, and his wife Anne Lane. Her sisters were Elizabeth, the eldest, Ann, Mary and Rachel, and her only brother, Peter, was born in October 1751.

Her mother died on 7 May 1754, when Alice was about five, and was buried at St. James's Church, Perkiomen. Her father died four years later. On 24 March 1758, "being sick & weak in Body," he made a will that ordered his whole estate sold and the money put out at interest. It left £10 to "my daughter Alse Rambo," to be paid when she turned twenty one. "All my Children shall be bound out till they be of age," it said. To be bound out was to be placed by indenture in another household, working for keep and learning housewifery until grown. The will was proved on 12 April 1758. She was about nine.

In 1766, at about eighteen, she chose her own guardian. A Pennsylvania orphan over fourteen could do that before the Orphans' Court. "Alice Rambo was born about 1748, was orphaned in 1758, and chose Jacob Umsted for her guardian in 1766," the family genealogy records. Jacob Umstead had been one of her father's executors.

She married Edward "Neddy" Roberts on 8 April 1768, on a licence issued by the Province of Pennsylvania, and bore nine children. Three years after the wedding her grandfather Samuel Lane remembered her in his will, among "my grand Children, which are the Children of John Rambo deceased Viz Ann Todd, Alee Roberts ...". Her share was £20, by the Rambo genealogy.

Her father's family were Swedes. A compiled genealogy of 2007, The Rambo Family Tree, carries his line back through Peter Rambo of Providence and Gunnar Rambo to Peter Gunnarsson Rambo, who came to New Sweden on the Kalmar Nyckel in 1640. Those steps rest on that book. Her mother's family, the Lanes, had been on the Perkiomen since her great-grandfather Edward Lane bought land there in 1698, by an 1895 parish history. She married into a family that was Welsh the whole way down.

Her husband died intestate in March 1810 and the settlement of his estate calls her his widow. She died on 24 November 1817 in her sixty-ninth year and is buried at the Lower Providence Baptist Church Cemetery, on the half acre Thomas David had set aside sixty-one years earlier for a burying place free for all Christians.

If Alice Rambo is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Alice Rambo (1749-1817)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/alice-rambo-1749-1817-9107c4.