♀Abiah Filley

Abiah Filley (11 March 1743 – 19 October 1784) was a woman of the Connecticut Colony^W. The Barbour Collection of Connecticut town vital records gives her birth at Windsor and her marriage to Adam Mott at Winchester in 1760, and lists eight children by him. She was the fourth great-grand-aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the sister of Mary Filley (1752–1815), Roger’s fourth great-grandmother.

Early life

The Barbour Collection of Connecticut town vital records, abstracting the Windsor registers, gives Abiah’s birth at Windsor on 11 March 1743. She was the fourth of the nine known children of William Filley (1709–1756) and Abiah Millington (1711–1766). By July 1754 the family had moved to Torrington, in Litchfield County, where her parents were admitted to the church.

Her father died at Torrington on 16 June 1756, when she was thirteen. In April 1757 her mother was appointed administratrix of his estate, and the family tree places her mother’s marriage to Joel Beach in October of that year, which would make him Abiah’s stepfather. The real estate was divided among the widow and six children, and the distribution, signed on 25 March 1759, sets out a share to “Abiah Dafter”. One of the three men appointed to make the division was named Adam Mott, the name of her future husband; the distribution does not say whether it was the same man.

Marriage and family

Abiah married Adam Mott at Winchester on 3 January 1760, at the age of sixteen. The Winchester town records, as abstracted in the Barbour Collection, list eight children born to Adam and Abiah Mott: Elizabeth, the first, ten months after the wedding, then Ira, Diantha, Lodema, Sabra, Orange, Loammi and, in 1780, a daughter, Abiah.

She died at Winchester on 19 October 1784, aged forty-one, and is entered in the town’s death records as Abiah Mott, with Adam named as her husband. Her youngest child was then four. Adam Mott married again at Winchester on 14 February 1786, to Anna Cyrena Filley.

Notes

The 1784 death

Earlier versions of the family tree placed the death of 19 October 1784 on Abiah Millington, her mother, at Windsor. The Winchester entries name Adam as the spouse, and eight children born between 1760 and 1780 fit a mother born in 1743; a mother born in 1711 would have been forty-nine at the first birth. The death belongs to the daughter, and it took place at Winchester.

The Torrington marriage of 1757

Barbour’s Torrington abstract records the marriage of an “Abiah Filley” to Joel Beach on 18 October 1757; whether she was the daughter, then fourteen, or the widow is open. The family tree places it on her mother. The same Torrington records enter “Abiah, wife of Joel” at a death on 7 August 1766, and a woman who had married Adam Mott in 1760 could not have been Joel’s wife in 1766.

Anna Cyrena Filley

The Winchester records enter Anna Cyrena Gleason’s marriage to a Remembrance Filley in 1774, and that Remembrance’s marriage to Hannah Hubbard in December 1783. He was therefore living and remarried when Anna Cyrena married Adam Mott in 1786, so she was a former wife rather than a widow, unless two men bore the name. The Torrington baptism of 1754 was of a Remembrance recorded as a daughter, the estate distribution signed in 1759 calls a Remembrance a son, and the records do not settle which one married Anna Cyrena.