♀Abigail Andrews

Abigail Andrews was the wife of Daniel Hovey, a planter of Ipswich, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and the mother of his six sons and his daughter; she was with him at Hadley, on the Connecticut River frontier, in the years of King Philip’s War^W. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, all through her son Joseph Hovey (born 1653).

Family

A compiled study of the Great Migration of New England settlers gives her birth as about 1623, an estimate only.

By the 1913 history, Daniel Hovey married Abigail Andrews, a daughter of Robert Andrews of Ipswich, about 1641. Her father made his will on 1 March 1643/4 and died within weeks, before it was proved on 26 March 1644. If his granddaughter Elizabeth Franklin died before her legacy fell due, ten pounds of it was to go to “Daniell Hovey my grand child”, Abigail’s young son.

In 1683 Daniel wrote that more than forty years before he had matched with “his Loving & welbeloved sister Abigal Andrews”, meaning her brother Thomas Andrews, the Ipswich schoolmaster, and that the Lord had blessed them with six sons and a daughter. The history names them as Daniel, John, Thomas, James, Joseph and Nathaniel, born at Ipswich between 1642 and 1657, and Abigail, who married John Ayers. Her brother had taught some of her grandchildren: when his estate was settled, Daniel told the county court that their sons Daniel and John owed it about four pounds for the schooling of their children.

Topsfield, Quaboag and Hadley

By the same history, Daniel was living on his farm at Topsfield in 1663 and 1664, joined the Ipswich colony at Quaboag, later named Brookfield, in 1668, and had settled at Hadley before the attack on Quaboag in August 1675, in which their son James was killed. Abigail was with him at Hadley. In 1676 Daniel sued John Russell junior at the Springfield court for slandering him and his wife, Russell having charged him in an open assembly with “a Scandolous life”; by the court records the 1913 history prints, the jury found for Daniel Hovey.

Abigail died, by the 1913 history, between 1676 and 1683. Daniel outlived her by at least nine years, and when he made his will in March 1691/2 he left “my wife wearing aparell” to their son Nathaniel’s children.

Lines of descent

Daniel Hovey and Abigail Andrews stand eleven generations above Nancy Jane Blanchard, by three separate lines, all through their son Joseph Hovey (born 1653). The lines meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Daniel and Abigail, and once more in Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy Jane Blanchard’s father, whose parents, Wesley’s son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942), were both descended from them too.

Notes

Her parents, the marriage date, the children’s births, the family’s moves and the range for her death all come from The Hovey Book (Daniel Hovey Association, 1913). The book prints Daniel’s 1683 letter from the Salem court files and his will from the probate office at Salem in full, from the originals; both come down only through the book’s printing. Her father’s will is printed in George Francis Dow’s The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. I, from the Ipswich Deeds. The book makes her mother Robert’s wife Elizabeth, but the will does not make Elizabeth the mother of his children. The book also gives his death as 1643, the will’s own year in the old reckoning that began the year on 25 March, has him leaving Daniel a legacy of ten pounds, and quotes the will as mentioning “my son Daniel Hovey’s child, Daniel Hovey my grandchild”; in the will the ten pounds was for the grandson, and only if Elizabeth Franklin died first. The birth year is Anderson’s estimate (The Great Migration, volume 1, page 54).

Her son Joseph’s place in the family is on record: in 1693 the Suffolk County probate court granted administration of the estate of Joseph Hovey of Milton to “John Hovey of Topsfield”, his brother, and Daniel’s will names “my son John of topsfeld” and Joseph’s children, while the 1683 letter names Joseph among Abigail’s sons.

The Angel Gabriel story

The 1913 history identifies her father with Captain Robert Andrewes, master of the Angel Gabriel^W, which was wrecked off Pemaquid in a storm in August 1635, with the captain and his family among the passengers saved, and supposes that Abigail came to New England with them. The identification cannot stand: Robert Andrews of Ipswich was made a freeman of the colony on 6 May 1635, while the ship was still in England, and Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration calls it “a physical impossibility”.