♂Eleazer Carver

Eleazer Carver (flourished 1719–1738) was a man of Middleborough and Bridgewater, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who married Katharine Elmes at Middleborough in 1719 and raised a family of at least eight children, most of them born at Bridgewater. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Carver (1738–1803).

Marriage and family

On 2 December 1719 he married Katharine Elmes (born 1698) at Middleborough. The Reverend Peter Thacher entered the marriage in his own record: “Eleazer Carver and Katherine Elmes both of middleboro. were married Decem : 2 : 1719 by me Peter Thacher”. Their first child, Timothy, was born at Middleborough on 21 September 1720, ten months after the wedding.

By 1722 the family had moved to Bridgewater, where the town’s register of births enters seven children under both parents’ names, from Mary, born on 6 November 1722, to John, born on 30 November 1738. The Carver Family of New England also lists a daughter Mercy and a second son named Timothy, whose birth its compiler himself doubted; its list ends in 1735 and leaves out John. Taken together, the town books and the family history account for at least eight children.

Children

Of those seven, Mary married Abraham Perkins in 1743. Their son Eleazer, born in 1724, married Hepzibah Perkins at Bridgewater in 1746, held a lieutenant’s rank, and died on 15 May 1755 in his thirty-first year. Their daughter Bethiah, born in 1732, died in 1753 in her twenty-second year, and their son Rodulphus, born in 1735, married Abigail Bowman of Bedford at Lexington in 1763. The Bridgewater marriage records hold none for their daughters Katharine, born in 1726, and Mercy, born in 1730. John, born in 1738, was the youngest.

Because father and son shared a name, the son’s birth, marriage, death and estate have been attached to the father in record indexes and on an online memorial. In the Bridgewater records of the 1740s and 1750s, “Eleazer Jr.” means the son.

Notes

His parents are not known. The Carver Family of New England makes him a son of Deacon Eleazer Carver of Bridgewater and says he was born “probably at Taunton or Bridgewater, about 1696”, and a family chart compiled in 1994 gives the same parentage; no record has been found that confirms either the birth or the parentage. The printed Bridgewater vital records hold no birth for him, and no death for him or for Katharine: the Carver entries in those volumes were read one by one. Deacon Eleazer Carver, whose death at Bridgewater on 25 January 1744 in his seventy-fifth year they do record, had a wife named Experience; he was not the Eleazer who married Katharine. A Dr. Eleazer Carver, who married Sarah Keith in 1776, belonged to a later generation.

The printed Bridgewater deaths include an unnamed wife of an Eleazer Carver who died on 26 November 1776; one private record calls her the wife of Lt. Carver, which points to the lieutenant’s widow, and she is not taken to be Katharine. Bethiah’s death is printed as 6 October 1758 with the editors’ “sic”, and two private records give 1753, the year used here; the register’s entry for Mercy has her name written above a crossed-out word.