♂Benjamin Hawes

Benjamin Hawes (20 March 1683 – 1722) was a colonist born at Yarmouth, on Cape Cod, who married on Martha’s Vineyard and died at Edgartown at the age of thirty-nine. His grandfather Edmond Hawes left him and his brother Isaac a calf each in his will of 1692. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Jedidah Hawes (1709–1764).

Early life

Benjamin was born at Yarmouth, then in Plymouth Colony, on 20 March 1683, a son of John Hawes (1640–1701) and Desire Gorham (1644–1700). His grandfather Edmond Hawes had come from England and settled at Yarmouth, and when Edmond made his will in May 1692 he left “my two grandchildren Isaac and Benjamin … to each of them one Calf”. Benjamin’s father appears in that estate’s probate in 1693 as Ensign John Hawes, and by his death he was called Captain.

His mother died on 30 June 1700 and his father on 11 November 1701, when Benjamin was eighteen. His father’s will, dated 15 October 1701, gave the house and land to his brothers Isaac, Ebenezer and Joseph, and left the rest of the movable estate in equal shares “unto my two sons John and Benjamin and my foure daughters Elizabeth Dogget and Mary Baron, Desire and Experience”. The overseers named were the testator’s “loving brothers” Major John Gorham, Benjamin’s mother’s brother, and John Thacher. A compiled account of the family says that the inventory of the estate listed “two Negro boys and an Indian girl”, valued together at £46, without naming them.

A study of the English ancestry of the Hawes family, published in the 1910s, and Robert Charles Anderson’s study of the Great Migration both make his mother a granddaughter of John Howland of the Mayflower, through her mother Desire Howland. John Howland’s will of 1672 names a daughter “Desire Gorham”, but no record ties Benjamin’s mother to that marriage, so the link rests on the compiled studies.

Marriage and family

On 24 July 1705, at Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, Benjamin married Dorcas Smith (1687–1730), described as “of Martha’s Vineyard”. A compiled genealogy of the descendants of John Howland, which prints the family in an allied-family section, lists six children born between 1706 and 1722: Experience, who married Shubael Claghorn; Jedidah, who married Jabez Sherman of Dartmouth; Benjamin; Samuel, who later moved to Dartmouth; and two sons named Shubael. The first Shubael was born in August 1720 and died in March 1722. The second was born on 22 December 1722, after his father’s death, and later moved to Newport, Rhode Island.

Benjamin died at Edgartown in the autumn of 1722, after making his will there on 15 October. Administration of his estate was granted on 28 November 1722 at Chilmark, by Pain Mayhew, judge of probate. Dorcas outlived him by nearly eight years and died on 4 August 1730.

Will

On 15 October 1722 Benjamin made his will at Edgartown, describing himself as “weak of body”, and his wife Dorcas was pregnant with the child the will provides for. He left her a third of his personal estate, a third of his real estate for her lifetime, and half the dwelling house while she remained a widow, together with five pounds a year “in case the child shee goes with should live”, to bring it up. His eldest son Benjamin received his silver-headed cane and seal ring, and his eldest daughter Experience his mother’s great Bible; his sons Benjamin and Samuel were to have the housing, home lot and an eleventh part of Chappaquiddick, “not to be sold out of the name of the Hawes”. The rest of his personal estate went to his two sons, his two daughters Experience and Jedidah, and the unborn child.

Notes

The source for his birth prints the date as “March 20, 1682-3”, a double date from the period when the civil year began on 25 March; in the modern calendar it is 20 March 1683. The compiled Howland genealogy gives the year as 1682, and a family pedigree compiled in 1994 gives 24 September 1682. The same Howland genealogy gives his death as October 1722. His will is dated 15 October 1722 and administration was granted on 28 November 1722, so the death falls between those two dates; the day itself is not known.