♂Benjamin Clough

Benjamin Clough (born 25 May 1740) was the youngest of the eleven children born at Salisbury, Massachusetts, to the millwright Zacheus Clough, and most likely the Benjamin Clough of Poplin, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, whose four children by his wife Meribah King were born there between 1759 and 1764. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Clough.

Parents and siblings

Benjamin was born at Salisbury on 25 May 1740, the son of Zacheus Clough and his wife Sarah, and the last of their eleven children, whose births were entered in the town’s records between 1716 and 1740. Zacheus and Sarah had married there on 21 January 1713-14; the register gives her name as Sarah Page, though the surname is not clear on the original entry. Two of the boys died in childhood, among them the first Benjamin, born in 1716, who died in January 1726 at the age of nine, and the youngest child was given his name.

By 1752 Zacheus was living at Brentwood in New Hampshire, where he made his will on 15 December of that year. It names his wife Sarah and the nine children then alive: Jabez, six daughters, and “my other two sons”, Zacheus and Benjamin, to whom the estate was left and who were both still under twenty-one. The will was proved on 11 August 1757. Benjamin was then seventeen, and two years later he married.

That the Benjamin who married at Poplin was this son is the most likely reading of the records, not a proved one: no record states that the Poplin father was Zacheus’s son. The birth date matches the one a family chart compiled in 1994 gives for him, and the will shows a son of that name born about then, but a namesake cannot be excluded.

Family

In June 1759 he married Meribah King. The New Hampshire state copies of Poplin’s births record the children of Benjamin Clough and Meribah King: a daughter Judith, born in November 1759; a son John, born on 23 November 1761; a daughter Dorithy, born in January 1763, who died that August; and a son Benjamin, born in October 1764. John’s card, a town clerk’s certified copy, gives his father as Benjamin Clough and his mother’s maiden name as “Meribah King”. No later record of the family has been found.

A son in Maine

Their son Benjamin, born on 7 October 1764, also went to the Kennebec. In his own pension declaration, sworn on 14 May 1818 before the same judge as his brother John a month earlier, he said he was fifty-three, born in Poplin, and living at Monmouth, in Kennebec County, Maine; he had served in the 3rd Massachusetts regiment and then Col. Henry Jackson’s regiment from 1782 until his discharge at West Point on 30 June 1784. An online grave memorial gives his death on 12 June 1840 and his burial at Monmouth, with the stone’s age of 75 years, and names his wife as Molly (Mary) Marston.

Notes

The 1994 chart gives Benjamin’s birth at Poplin on 25 May 1740, his marriage there in June 1759, and the death of both him and his wife in 1772, and it spells her surname Ring. The Salisbury register places the birth at Salisbury, and two indexes of New Hampshire marriages give the marriage as June 1759. A genealogy of the descendants of John Clough of Salisbury, published in 1952, gives the same marriage and says that Meribah died in 1772 and Benjamin the same year “of an epidemic”; it is a compilation, and no record of either death has been found. It also lists a fifth child, Daniel, born about 1765, whom no record names; the Poplin birth entries show only the four children above.

An online family tree gives Benjamin a second marriage, on 12 January 1768, to Betty Perkins of Hampton Falls, and a death at Poplin in 1772, neither with a source. The same bride appears in the indexes as marrying on that day a Benjamin Clough born on 1 November 1737 at Kensington, and the marriage most likely belongs to him.

The transcript of the father’s will records that the executor’s account of the estate was approved by Benjamin Clough on 25 April 1759. A Benjamin born in 1740 would then have been eighteen, and which Benjamin that was is not settled. The 1782 will of John Clough of Poplin names a son Benjamin who was then alive; whether that son was this Benjamin, which would make the chart’s 1772 death wrong, is not known.

The mother’s surname is Page in the printed register and in a compiled genealogy; the court-book entry for the marriage does not settle it.

The link to Phillips and Hallowell

John Clough, a Revolutionary War pensioner living at Phillips, Maine, swore in 1818 that he was “born in Poplin New Hampshire”, and his wife was named Elizabeth, like the Elizabeth Savage with whom a John Clough of Hallowell filed an intention to marry on 5 April 1784. That joins the Phillips man to Poplin. That he was this Benjamin’s son rests on a family chart compiled in 1994, which names Benjamin and Meribah as his parents and gives his birth at Poplin on 23 November 1761, the date on the card. The other John Clough born at Poplin in those years, in February 1760, was the son of John and Mary Clough; his father’s will, made in 1782 and proved in 1787, left him “all my home place land & buildings laying in Poplin” and named him executor. The pensioner’s age, 58 in April 1818, fits that 1760 John better than the 1761 one, but the age he gave for his wife in 1820 is also two years too high for her recorded birth, so the question is open and the parentage stays probable.