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Eva
Jay Munro
Eva Jay was born in November 1728. She was the daughter of Peter and Mary Van Cortlandt Jay of Westchester County. Eva was not a healthy girl and also was beset by emotional problems. Marriage age passed and Eva remained a spinster living on her family's Westchester estate and also at the family home in Manhattan.
Eva
was thirty-eight years old when she became the third
wife of thirty-six year-old Reverend Harry Munro
in March 1766. At the time, the marriage connected
an ambitious cleric with the most prominent families
in Westchester County. With their new-born son, she
followed Munro to Albany where he had been installed
as rector of St. Peter's Anglican Church.
The
Munros moved into the new Albany parsonage and she
often accompanied her husband to minister to the
Mohawks. But by mid-1775, her trips to the Caughnawaga
mission were more to see a husband who was less comfortable
in Albany's charged and increasingly anti-British
climate.
At
the outbreak of hostilities, the Scottish-born Munro
had been identified as a Tory. Within a year, he
was imprisoned. In 1777, he escaped to the British
in New York never to return. With the chapel closed
and with most St. Peter's parishioners under suspicion
themselves, the fragile and aging Eva found little
comfort in Albany - even though she was the older
sister of revolutionary leader John Jay. She lived
out the war with the Jay family in rural Westchester
Couty - returning to Albany in 1779 to beg that
her departed husband's name not be included in the
Act of Attainder - which would deprive her of his
property.
Although
there was some talk of her joining her exiled husband
in Scotland, Eva and her son remained with the Jay
family. Her marriage was a casualty of the war!
Eva
Jay Munro died in April 1810. Deserted by her husband,
she was buried in the Jay family plot in Rye, New
York.
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Sources: The life of Eva Jay Munro is CAP biography number
1065. This profile is derived chiefly from family
and community-based resources.
By Stefan Bielinski, Colonial Albany Social History Project [http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany]
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