♀Bithiah Dodson

Bithiah Dodson (about 1672 – 25 October 1746) was a woman of Scituate, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who married Rodolphus Elmes there on 20 February 1696. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Katharine Elmes (born 1698).

The printed vital records of Scituate enter the marriage under both surnames: “Bithiah [Dodson] and Rodolphus Elmes” among the Dodsons, and “Rodolphus and Bithiah Dodson” among the Elmeses. They print the year as 1695-6, because under the Old Style calendar^W then in use the year began on 25 March. The couple’s children were born at Scituate: Mary on 8 November 1696, entered as the daughter of “Rodolphus Jr.”, Katharine on 22 March 1698, and Rodolphus on 6 July 1700. The family later appears at Middleborough, where the town records further Elmes children, among them Ignatius, born in 1706, and a Bithiah. Her daughter Katharine, who married Eleazer Carver, in turn named a daughter Bethiah, born at Bridgewater in 1732. An index to a printed Carver family genealogy gives her name as “Bethiah (Dodson) Elmes”. She was a daughter of Anthony Dodson and Mary Williams of Scituate: after her father’s death the Plymouth Colony court ordered in 1682 that the four daughters, “Patience, Mary, Bethya, & Eu[nice]”, have ten pounds apiece. She died at Middleborough, in Plymouth County, on 25 October 1746, and was buried in the cemetery at The Green there. A printed gravestone record gives her age at death as in her seventy-fifth year, which places her birth about 1672.