♀Dorcas Smith

Dorcas Smith (1687 – 4 August 1730) was a woman of Martha’s Vineyard who married Benjamin Hawes of Yarmouth at Edgartown in 1705 and outlived him by nearly eight years. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Jedidah Hawes (1709–1764).

Early life

She was the daughter of Benjamin Smith, Esq., of Edgartown, as the town record of her 1705 marriage names her father. Her mother was most likely Jedidah Mayhew, Benjamin Smith’s wife: the town records name Benjamin Smith, Esq., and Jedidah as the parents of a son born in 1691, and Banks’s History of Martha’s Vineyard, a compiled genealogy, lists Dorcas among their children. Her parents had eight children in all, the others being Jane, who married Thomas Chase in 1704; Jedidah, who married Samuel Osborn in 1710; Benjamin, born 29 December 1691; Mary, who married Timothy Daggett in 1717; Thomas, born 1697; Abiah, who married Thomas Claghorn and died in 1730; and Ebenezer, born 1700. Her father’s will of 14 February 1719/20 left her forty shillings, naming her “Dorcus Haws”. The compiled genealogy of the descendants of John Howland that records her marriage names her only as Dorcas Smith “of Martha’s Vineyard”, and later accounts give her birth as 1687 at Edgartown.

Marriage and children

On 24 July 1705, at Edgartown, then in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, she married Benjamin Hawes (1683–1722), who had been born at Yarmouth on Cape Cod. The same Howland genealogy lists six children born between 1706 and 1722: Experience, who married Shubael Claghorn; Jedidah, born on 30 July 1709, who married Jabez Sherman; Benjamin; Samuel; and two sons named Shubael, the first of whom was born in August 1720 and died in March 1722. Dorcas was pregnant when Benjamin made his will at Edgartown on 15 October 1722, and he died there in the autumn of that year. The second Shubael, the child she was carrying, was born on 22 December 1722, after his father’s death.

Second marriage and death

Dorcas was left a widow in 1722. On 22 December 1724, at Edgartown, she married John Worth, Esq., and they had three children there: John, born 14 September 1725; Sarah, born 5 November 1727; and Dorcas, born 6 July 1730, four weeks before her mother died. She died at Edgartown on 4 August 1730, and the town’s death entry names her as the wife of John Worth, Esq. She was buried at Edgartown, and the younger Dorcas lived until 1809.

Notes

A notice in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register gives the same death date, 4 August 1730 at Edgartown, but names the woman Dorcas Worth. The Vital Records of Edgartown account for that surname: the marriage entry of 22 December 1724 reads “John Esq. and Mrs. Darcas Hawes”, and the death entry of 4 August 1730 reads “Darcas, w. John Esq.” The 1705 marriage entry spells her first name “Darcus”. A bracketed note in the Vital Records, on the death entry of a daughter of the marriage, calls her John Worth’s third wife, and Banks’s History of Martha’s Vineyard lists her second husband as John Worth, married 22 December 1724.