FOR A FUTURE MERCHANT destined to play a major role in Boston’s maritime history, Enoch Train had an unlikely start in life. He grew up as an orphan in a remote farming village at least two days’ travel from the sea. Strangely, though, this unpromising circumstance was crucial in launching his career, providing him a privileged entrée into the world of maritime commerce he could never otherwise have expected. Hillsborough, New Hampshire, the farming village where he grew up, was not his original home. That had been about sixty miles south in Weston, Massachusetts, much closer to Boston and its waterfront. But thanks mostly to his mother’s errant behavior, his family had moved repeatedly during his early childhood. When he arrived in Hillsborough, probably around the age of six, it was the fourth place in which he had lived. The family’s first move followed an incident when Enoch was two, in 1803. His mother, Hannah, was expelled from the local Baptist church in Weston. Its members “voted that the wife of Enoch Train [Enoch’s father] shall be cut off from all the privileges of church on account of misconduct.” The nature of her transgression was not recorded, but the severity of her punishment suggests it was serious. Her disgrace must have been particularly mortifying for her husband, whose family had been in Weston for generations, and whose brother was a founder and deacon of the church that had just expelled her. Possibly for that reason, Mr. Train moved the family out of Weston shortly afterwards; when the couple’s third child was born in the spring of 1805, they were living ten miles away in Needham. Alas for the three children—Elmira, six, Enoch, almost four, and Sally, the new baby—more trouble was on the way. In November 1805, barely seven months after Sally’s birth, their father died. What happened to them next is not exactly clear, except that by 1810 their mother had abandoned them. The known facts are these. In the spring of 1807, she married a man in Vermont by whom she was already pregnant. And when the national census was taken three years later, none of her children by her first husband were living with her and his successor. Although there are no contemporaneous records to show where the children had gone, decades later Enoch Train was mistakenly described as a native of Hillsborough, New Hampshire. And since his father’s brother Ephraim had moved there from Weston in 1781, it seems reasonable to conclude that this is where he and his sisters were sent by their mother. Given that Enoch was later assumed to have been born there, the transfer probably occurred when he was still very young—perhaps in 1806, soon after his father’s death. Effectively orphaned by their mother’s actions, the children attained that status formally when she passed away in 1814 at the age of forty-three. Enoch was almost thirteen at the time and would soon leave Hillsborough to embark on the career that would make him one of Boston’s most prominent citizens. Ironically, to prepare him for this career his delinquent mother could hardly have done better than to offload him onto her brother-in-law in New Hampshire, his Uncle Ephraim. For Ephraim had a son twenty years older than Enoch who had already established himself as a maritime merchant in Boston. Samuel was his name. And without the groundwork his cousin Samuel had laid, Enoch might never have been able to rise to the heights that he did.