♂Ebenezer Allen

Ebenezer Allen (10 February 1650 – 1725) was a blacksmith and farmer of Dartmouth in Plymouth Colony, one of the town’s original proprietors and a member of its Quaker community, whose will left his widow “the biggest and best room” in the house and whose wife has long been given the wrong family. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Philip Allen (1684–1752).

Early life

Ebenezer Allen was born at Sandwich, Plymouth Colony, on 10 February 1650, the son of Ralph Allen, a wheelwright of Sandwich, whose will of December 1691 names Ebenezer as a son and as executor. His mother’s forename is given as Susanna in compilations, without record evidence cited, and her surname is not known. He had brothers John, Joseph, Increase and Zachariah, and a sister Patience. He later bought an eighth share of a proprietor’s right in the lands and meadows of Dartmouth from Zachariah. A family record describes him as a blacksmith and farmer and as one of the original proprietors of Dartmouth, where he had settled by the 1680s.

Marriage and family

He married a woman named Abigail before 1682. The Dartmouth town records list nine of their children, born between 1682 and 1705: Mary, Philip, Zebulun, Ebenezer, Sarah, James, Hannah, Seth and Abigail. The youngest, Abigail, born on 16 December 1705, is named in his will and married Thomas Akin at the Friends’ meeting in Dartmouth in August 1727, when the record describes her as the daughter of “Ebenezer dec’d”.

Will and death

Ebenezer Allen signed his will on “the eighteenth day of the second month called April” 1725. The wording is Quaker: Friends avoided the month names, which came from pagan gods, and numbered the months instead; and because the year was then reckoned to begin in March, April was the second month. The will left his wife the use of “the biggest and best room” in the dwelling house for as long as she remained his widow, a common way of providing for a widow while the house itself passed to a son, divided his land among his sons Philip, James, Seth and Ebenezer, and left money to his married daughters Mary Briggs, Sarah Akin and Hannah Howland, and a bed, two cows and a hundred pounds to his unmarried daughter Abigail. He named his wife Abigail executrix and his son Philip executor. His son Zebulun is not mentioned, and was probably dead by then.

He died at Dartmouth after making his will on 18 April 1725 and before 15 May 1725, when an inventory of his estate, taken by Capt. John Akin and others of Dartmouth, describes him as deceased. On 18 May 1725 his son Philip Allen, executor, brought the inventory before Judge Nathaniel Blagrove at Bristol and made oath that it contained the whole of the personal estate. The inventory lists “To the Negro Boy” among his property, an enslaved boy whom the inventory does not name. Philip Allen swore to his account as executor on 24 April 1726. It shows an estate inventoried at £1,162, a third set aside for “mother Allen” as her widow’s share, and legacies paid to the children and to Thomas Briggs, David Akin and Isaac Howland, who were evidently the husbands of his three married daughters.

Notes

His wife’s surname is not known. Family compilations have called her Abigail Hill, a daughter of Zebulon Hill of Salem, but a 1729 deed shows that Zebulon Hill’s daughter Abigail was then the wife of a Joseph Allen of Salem, while Ebenezer’s widow was living at Dartmouth. Neither his will nor the executor’s account names her family. Older compilations gave his mother as Esther Swift, but she was the wife of a different Ralph Allen of Sandwich, a mason, and his father’s will settles which Ralph was his.