♀Abiah Millington

Abiah Millington (16 May 1711 – 7 August 1766) was a Connecticut colonist, born at Windsor, who married William Filley there in 1730, raised nine children with him, moved with him to Torrington in the early 1750s, and, widowed in 1756, married again at Torrington the following year. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Filley (1752–1815).

Early life

Abiah Millington was born at Windsor, in Hartford County, Connecticut Colony, on 16 May 1711, the daughter of Henry Millington. The Windsor town records, as abstracted in the Barbour Collection of Connecticut vital records, enter her birth together with those of a brother, William, born 18 September 1713, and a sister, Mary, born 20 August 1716, all three as children of Henry, on adjoining pages of the town’s second register. Her mother is not named in any of these entries, and Henry Millington appears in them only as the children’s father; no birth, marriage or death of his own has been found in the Windsor records.

Marriage and family

She married William Filley (1709–1756), son of Josiah Filley of Windsor, at Windsor in June 1730; the town records describe both bride and groom as “of Windsor”. The couple’s children were registered at Windsor: William, born 5 March 1734/35; Isaac, 25 February 1736/37; Abraham, 28 April 1739; Abiah, 11 March 1743; Mercy, 7 November 1745; Gad, 28 January 1747/48; and Asher, whose birth is entered without a date. Their daughter Mary followed in 1752. The couple’s first two sons were entered on the same register page as the children of William’s father, Josiah, and the later ones in a newer run of the book.

By 1754 the family had moved to Torrington, in Litchfield County. On 17 July 1754 William Filley “and wife Abiah” were admitted to the Torrington church, an event entered in five separate church volumes, and on 11 August their daughter Remembrance, the ninth known child, was baptized there. Admission of the parents followed within weeks by a child’s baptism was the usual New England sequence.

Widowhood and death

William Filley died at Torrington on 16 June 1756, when Abiah was forty-five and her youngest children were small. Sixteen months later, on 18 October 1757, she married Joel Beach at Torrington. No children of this second marriage are recorded in the Torrington books.

She died on 7 August 1766 and is entered in the Torrington records as “Abiah, wife of Joel”, under the Beach family. She was fifty-five. Her daughter Mary, then fourteen, married John Curtis at Torrington three years later.

Notes

The Barbour abstract gives the Windsor marriage twice from the same page of the town register, once as 15 June and once as 16 June 1730; the family tree uses 15 June, and only the original register can say which day is right.

Earlier versions of the family tree gave her death as 19 October 1784 at Windsor. That date belongs to her daughter and namesake Abiah Filley (born 1743), who married Adam Mott at Winchester on 3 January 1760 and died there on 19 October 1784 as “Abiah Mott, wife of Adam”. The Winchester records give Adam and Abiah Mott eight children born between 1760 and 1780, which fits a mother born in 1743 and not one born in 1711. The place was wrong as well as the date: the 1784 death was at Winchester, not Windsor.

Online trees often call her “Abiah Drake Millington”. No record found supports the middle name Drake; the Windsor entries name only her father.