♂Daniel Hovey

Daniel Hovey (about 1618 – 24 April 1692) was a planter of Ipswich, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who took his family west to the frontier settlements of Quaboag and Hadley and came back to Ipswich after King Philip’s War^W. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, all through his son Joseph Hovey (born 1653).

Ipswich

A family history published in 1913 has Daniel Hovey settling at Ipswich in 1635, at the age of seventeen, and makes him the son of Richard Hovey, a glover of Waltham Abbey in Essex, England. Its evidence is his own book, a copy of the poems of Du Bartas^W in which he wrote that he was born at Waltham Abbey in August 1618 and that John Guibon, the minister of that town, had sent it to him as a token in the year of the Pequot War^W. His will, made in March 1691/2, gives his age as “sevnty three & gom to sevnty fower”, which agrees. In September 1678, aged sixty, he testified at the Ipswich court that in June 1638 he had been living in the house of Goodman Button when the earthquake struck.

The town records the history quotes show Ipswich granting him a house lot on the south side of the Town River and planting ground on Sagamore Hill in 1639, and Daniel buying the neighboring lots and house of William Holdred. He served the town as a surveyor of highways, a juror, a constable and, from 1659, a selectman, and in 1659 he was given leave to build a wharf against the ground he had bought of William Knowlton on the river. In 1660 he bought seventy acres at Topsfield, and he was living on that farm in 1663 and 1664. In 1667 the Ipswich court fined him twenty shillings for speaking falsely to the prejudice of Daniel Denison^W, the magistrate and militia leader, over a case Denison had decided.

Family

By the 1913 history, Daniel Hovey married Abigail Andrews, a daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Andrews of Ipswich, about 1641. Robert Andrews died in 1643, leaving Daniel a legacy of ten pounds. In 1683 Daniel wrote that more than forty years before he had matched with “his Loving & welbeloved sister Abigal Andrews”, meaning her brother Thomas Andrews, the Ipswich schoolmaster, and that the Lord had blessed them with six sons and a daughter. The history names them as Daniel, John, Thomas, James, Joseph and Nathaniel, born at Ipswich between 1642 and 1657, and Abigail, who married John Ayers.

Quaboag and Hadley

By the same account, Daniel joined the Ipswich colony at Quaboag, later named Brookfield, in 1668, with his sons James and Thomas on the lots beside his own. From there, in June 1671, he made over his Topsfield farm to his son John, who was living on it, in return for John’s land at Ipswich, forty pounds and thirty shillings a year for life. He was still at Quaboag in May 1672 but had settled at Hadley, on the Connecticut River, before the attack on Quaboag in August 1675, in which his son James was killed.

At Hadley he farmed land of the late Henry Clerke, and in September 1676 Clerke’s executors won fourteen pounds from him at the Springfield court for unpaid rent. Daniel answered with a suit against one of them, John Russell junior, for slandering him and his wife: Russell had charged him in an open assembly with “a Scandolous life”, for which he had been denied church communion. By the court records the 1913 history prints, the jury found for Daniel Hovey.

Back at Ipswich

By the 1913 history he went back to Ipswich in 1678. Three years later he petitioned the council at Boston, saying that while living at Hadley in the war he had spent “much of my Estate in the Countreys service against the common enemy”, besides his losses, and in 1681 the council ordered the treasurer to pay him eleven pounds. In 1683, when the estate of his wife’s brother Thomas Andrews was being settled, Daniel wrote to the county court setting out the schoolmaster’s kin: five of his own sons were still living, and Daniel and John owed the estate about four pounds for the schooling of their children.

Abigail died, by the 1913 history, between 1676 and 1683. Daniel made his will on 21 March 1691/2. He had already given Daniel, John and Abigail their portions; he left Hovey’s Island to Thomas and to James’s son Daniel, land at Ipswich to Joseph and Nathaniel to be shared among their children, and his clothes, pots and books among his grandchildren. Thomas was his executor and Daniel and John the overseers. The history gives his death at Ipswich on 24 April 1692, and the will was proved on 31 October 1692.

Lines of descent

Daniel Hovey and Abigail Andrews stand eleven generations above Nancy Jane Blanchard, by three separate lines, all through their son Joseph Hovey (born 1653). The lines meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Daniel and Abigail, and once more in Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy Jane Blanchard’s father, whose parents, Wesley’s son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942), were both descended from them too.

Notes

Almost everything on this page comes from The Hovey Book (Daniel Hovey Association, 1913): his settlement at Ipswich, the town grants and offices, the land deals, the marriage, the children, the moves to Quaboag and Hadley, James’s death, his own death date and the Hadley lawsuits. The book prints in full, from the originals, his petition of 1681 from the Massachusetts Archives, his 1683 letter from the Salem court files, and his will and inventory from the probate office at Salem; those texts come down only through the book’s printing. It also prints a certified copy, made in 1905, of the Waltham Abbey baptism of “Daniell Hovey, sonne too Richard Hovey” on 9 August 1618; his parents are not otherwise traced.

His son Joseph’s place in the family is on record: in 1693 the Suffolk County probate court granted administration of the estate of Joseph Hovey of Milton to “John Hovey of Topsfield”, his brother, and Daniel’s will names “my son John of topsfeld” and Joseph’s children. Abigail’s death between 1676 and 1683 is the 1913 history’s range; she is named in the Hadley suit of 1676, and the will of 1692 leaves “my wife wearing aparell” to Nathaniel’s children.

The June 1638 residence comes from Daniel’s own deposition, given at the Ipswich court in September 1678 and printed in Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, volume 7, page 86. The printed abstract spells the householder’s name Buton.