♀Anna Smith

Anna Smith (10 May 1764 – 18 September 1825) was the first wife of Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and the mother of all his children, at Raymond, New Hampshire, and then at Mount Vernon, in the District of Maine^W. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Early life

The town records of Brentwood, New Hampshire, give a daughter Anna born on 10 May 1764 to Obadiah Smith and Mary Leavitt, who had married on 5 February 1756. She was the fourth of their eight children, born between 1760 and 1774.

Marriage

Nathaniel Dudley and Anna Smith married when he was about twenty; a history of Raymond, New Hampshire, published in 1875, gives the year as 1783.

Lines of descent

According to the published family history and genealogical dictionary, the two were third cousins: her mother, Mary Leavitt, was a great-granddaughter of Samuel Dudley (1608–1683) through his daughter Dorothy and Moses Leavitt of Exeter.

Family and later life

The family history quotes Nathaniel calling her “one of the best of women”. According to the family history, the couple moved in August 1788 to a farm at Washington, later Mount Vernon. The Mount Vernon town records list eleven children of Nathaniel and Anna born between 1784 and 1806, among them Sarah on 25 June 1795; three died in early childhood. The family later moved on to Kingfield, and the family history gives the birth of the youngest child, William King Dudley, at Kingfield in 1810. Anna died on 18 September 1825, aged sixty-one, and was buried at Riverside Cemetery in Kingfield, Maine, where she shares a gravestone with her husband. Nathaniel married again in 1826; his second wife was Harriet Pullen, a widow.

Notes

Parentage

The Brentwood record does not mention Nathaniel Dudley; that this Anna is the one who married him rests on a family history published in 1886 by her grandson Dean Dudley, which calls her “Anne, or Anna” and names her parents as Obadiah Smith and Mary Leavitt. It makes Obadiah a son of Jonathan Smith of Exeter, New Hampshire, and Bridget Keniston, and Mary a daughter of Stephen Leavitt. The same book quotes a letter of 1865 in which her son John Gilman Dudley wrote that his mother was “a daughter of Obadiah Smith and his wife Mary (Leavitt)”. The Exeter town records, as printed in a history of the town in 1888, give Obadiah’s birth, to Jonathan and Bridget, on 26 March 1731, and the Brentwood book records the birth of his brother Nathan, to the same parents, on 7 May 1741.

Death and burial

The death date, the age and the burial place come from the gravestone itself at Riverside Cemetery in Kingfield, a slate shared with her husband, whose photograph is on Find a Grave (memorial 95045093). It reads “also his wife ANNA DUDLEY, DIED Sept. 18, 1825. Æt. 61.” Her age agrees with her birth on 10 May 1764. The stone gives no place of death. The year of Nathaniel’s second marriage, 1826, comes from the Dudley family history of 1848.