♀Abiel (surname unknown)

Abiel (died 18 September 1753) was a woman of Cambridge, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, who married three times and lived nearly forty years after the early death of her first husband, John Hovey. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Hovey (1707–1773).

First marriage

Most of what is known of her comes from a Hovey family genealogy published in 1913, which puts her birth at about 1687. The 1913 Hovey genealogy gives John Hovey’s marriage in 1706 and calls his wife Abiel Watson of Cambridge, but her maiden name is not known: “Watson” appears to be the name of her third husband. John, born at Hadley in 1684, was by the genealogy’s account a baker, and in 1709 he bought the old Blue Anchor tavern at Cambridge from his brother Joseph and kept it.

The couple had five children. Two compiled histories of the towns, published in 1879 and 1877, place the births of the eldest son, John, on 12 June 1707, and of a daughter, Sarah, on 28 February 1708/9, at Charlestown, which is most likely why neither appears in the Cambridge birth records. Three more sons, Thomas, James and Ebenezer, were registered at Cambridge as sons of John and Abiel, the youngest born on 12 July 1714. Sarah died at Cambridge on 11 October 1720, in her twelfth year. By the 1913 genealogy’s account, James became a joiner and later a preacher and justice of the peace at Plymouth, where he died on 7 January 1781, and Ebenezer a housewright, who died at Watertown on 11 April 1742.

John died on 13 September 1714, by the same genealogy, two months after Ebenezer’s birth, leaving an estate valued at £389 0s 8d. Abiel was appointed administratrix on 10 December 1715, and the probate court assigned the real estate to the eldest son, John.

Later marriages

On 9 April 1717 she married Edmund Angier of Cambridge; the 1913 genealogy and a genealogy of Charlestown families published in 1879 agree on the date, and the Charlestown book places the wedding there. Edmund died in April 1724, by both accounts, and on 27 August 1725, by the 1913 genealogy, she married Isaac Watson, a Cambridge yeoman.

By the 1913 genealogy’s account, her son Thomas, a physician, sailed to Africa as mate and physician of a ship and died unmarried at the English factory on the Gambia River in April 1732, aged twenty-one; she and Isaac were appointed administrators of his estate on 28 October 1734.

In November 1736, by the 1913 genealogy’s account of the Middlesex deeds, Abiel and her third husband, Isaac Watson, sold her interest in John Hovey’s estate to her son John for thirty pounds; the same day he bought his brother Ebenezer’s share, and his brother James sold him his a year later. On 12 November 1736 the couple also released, for fifty pounds, her interest in thirty acres that had belonged to her first husband’s estate.

The same genealogy records that Isaac Watson perished when his dwelling house burned, on 25 February 1741, at the age of fifty-four. Abiel lived on at Cambridge as his widow and died there on 18 September 1753, at sixty-six, by the genealogy’s account.

Notes

No record of her birth, parents or death is known. Her birth about 1687, her death and age, the second husband’s death, the third marriage, the fire, her son Thomas’s voyage, the careers of her sons James and Ebenezer and the deeds of 1736 all come from the 1913 genealogy (The Hovey Book, published by the Daniel Hovey Association), which is also the only source for the surname Watson as her maiden name. The printed Cambridge vital records name her with John as the parents of Thomas (1710), James (1712) and Ebenezer (1714), but they do not print the births of the eldest son, John, in 1707 or of Sarah in 1708/9, both of whom were born at Charlestown; the link between her and the Reverend John Hovey of Arundel rests on a deed recorded in 1736, in which Ebenezer Hovey of Cambridge, housewright, for seventy pounds sold “all my Right Title share and Proportion which I any way had to the Estate of our Honoured Father John Hovey of said Town decd” to “John Hovey of the Town aforesaid my Brother”; on the same page of the Middlesex deeds, “Mr Isaac Watson and Mrs Abiel Watson” acknowledged at Cambridge on 14 December 1736 their release to John Hovey. Ebenezer is the son the printed Cambridge vital records register as “s. of John and Abiel” on 12 July 1714, so the deeds tie the family to the John Hovey of Cambridge who is named as heir; that this John is the eldest son, the Reverend John Hovey born in 1707, is the 1913 genealogy’s identification.

The 1879 Charlestown genealogy (Thomas Bellows Wyman, The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown) lists her as “Abiel” with the maiden name left blank, names her later husbands Edmund Angier and Isaac Watson, records the administration of Thomas’s estate by Isaac Watson and his wife Abiel in 1734, and lists among her children by John Hovey a son John, born on 12 June and baptized on 15 June 1707, and a daughter Sarah, born on 28 February 1708/9, who died at Cambridge in 1720. The 1877 History of Cambridge (Lucius R. Paige) likewise gives her as the wife Abiel, who had at Charlestown John and Sarah and at Cambridge Thomas, James and Ebenezer, and dates her third marriage to Isaac Watson 27 August 1725 and her death 18 September 1753, aged 66. It gives Edmund Angier’s death as 4 April 1724, in his thirty-ninth year; the 1913 genealogy gives 24 April 1724, at thirty-nine. Neither town history gives her a maiden name, and Paige’s register of the Watson family knows her only as the widow of Edmund Angier and the wife of Isaac Watson from 1725; the printed Cambridge births include no Abiel Watson about 1687. The 1913 genealogy’s “Watson” therefore appears to be her third husband’s name, and her own is not known. The 1706 marriage itself has not been found in a record.