♀Amy Fish

Amy Fish (8 January 1705/06 – after 1745) was a Portsmouth, Rhode Island woman who married James Akin of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and raised her family across the bay at Dartmouth. Through her and through her elder brother Thomas, her parents Preserved Fish and Ruth Cook are ancestors of the Curtis family twice over. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Ruth Akin (1731–1821).

Early life

She was born at Portsmouth, on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island, on 8 January 1705/06, one of eight children of Preserved Fish (born 1679) and Ruth Cook. The Portsmouth register lists the family together: Grizzel, Ruth, Thomas, Amey, Sarah, John, Preserved and Benjamin, born between 1699 and 1716. Her father was himself a Portsmouth man; his parents were Thomas Fish and Grizzel Strange, whose marriage in December 1668 is quoted from the Portsmouth town record in a history of the Fish family published in 1948. A typescript pedigree dates that marriage to 1683, four years after his birth in 1679, but that date is an error. The clerks wrote her name in several ways, Amey at her birth, Amie at her marriage and at most of her children’s births, and once Almy.

Marriage and Dartmouth

On 31 October 1728 “James Akin, of Dartmouth and Amey Fish, of Portsmouth” were married by William Sanford, a justice of the peace, according to the Portsmouth town record. James Akin (1706–1804) had been born at Dartmouth on 1 August 1706, and the couple made their home there. The Dartmouth birth register records nine children of the couple, born between 1729 and 1745, all entered as the children of “James and Amie”: Anne, Ruth, Batcheller, John, Amie, Preserved, William, James and Mary. Mary’s entry gives her mother as “Almy”.

Lines of descent

Her brother Thomas and his wife Mercy Coggeshall also settled at Dartmouth, where their daughter Elizabeth was born in 1736, so that Amy’s daughter Ruth and Thomas’s daughter Elizabeth were first cousins growing up in the same town. A generation later Ruth’s son Batchelder Sherman married Elizabeth’s daughter Waite Allen. The marriage made Batchelder and Waite second cousins, and it is the reason Preserved Fish and Ruth Cook appear twice in the ancestry of their descendants, once through Amy and once through Thomas.

Later life and death

Amy died at Dartmouth after the birth of her youngest recorded child, Mary, in July 1745, and before March 1762, when her son John married at Dartmouth. James probably married again on 26 October 1748, to Ruth Sanford, who had also been born at Portsmouth. He lived until 1804. In September 1749 Amy’s daughter Ruth, then seventeen, married Henry Shearman at Dartmouth.

Notes

A compiled index of marriages dates the wedding 14 October 1728. The printed Portsmouth record, and a family history of the Akins that cites it, give 31 October.

The printed Dartmouth birth register names nine children of “James and Amie”, from Anne in April 1729 to Mary in July 1745, and all nine are counted in the body. An index of Dartmouth births also lists Akin children with a father named James between 1729 and 1745. There was more than one James Akin at Dartmouth, so only the children named in the printed register as children of James and Amie are counted here.

Her death

No record of her death or burial is known. The year 1748 that the family record gives has no source of its own; it appears to come from the Dartmouth marriage of 26 October 1748 that the family record gives to James Akin and Ruth Sanford. Dartmouth had a second James Akin, born 18 October 1728, a son of David and Sarah, and the marriage entry does not say which James was meant. What is firm is that Amy was living when Mary was born on 11 July 1745, and that a Friends’ marriage record of 24 March 1762 calls her son John “s. James and Amy (dec’d)”. She died between those dates, and probably before October 1748 if the James who married Ruth Sanford that month was her widower.

A community family tree gives her death as 1750 at Portsmouth, which does not fit his second marriage.