♀Elizabeth Clark

Elizabeth Clark (born about 1629) was the wife of William Furber, an early settler of Dover, in New Hampshire, who made his home at Welch Cove, a landing in what is now Newington. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Susannah Furber (1664–1732).

She married William Furber, probably before 1647. They are said to have had nine children: William, Elizabeth, Jethro, Hannah, Bethia, Abigail, Susannah, Bridget and Moses. Susannah, born on 5 May 1664, married John Bickford. In 1676, the year her husband told under oath how he had survived the wreck of the ship that brought him to New England, Elizabeth reportedly gave her own age in a sworn statement as forty-seven. She was still living in 1683; the date and place of her death are not known.

Notes

Her parents

The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Noyes, Libby and Davis calls her a daughter of Lieutenant William Clark “of London, Watertown, Ipswich and Salem” by his first wife, Elizabeth (Quick). The same entry records that in 1662 her husband acted for John, son of William Clark, late of Salem, in claiming a little neck of land on the Ipswich river where a house had once stood. Robert Charles Anderson, in The Great Migration Begins, does not accept the identification: “The GDMNH statement assumes much of what must be proved about these William Clarks, and further claims, without support, that a William Clark married Elizabeth Quick”. Frances Davis McTeer and Frederick C. Warner, who studied William Clark of Salem in The American Genealogist, give the children of his first wife as William, Thomas and Sarah. Her parents are not known.

Her age and marriage

Her birth about 1629 is worked back from the age of forty-seven she gave in 1676. The marriage before 1647, the list of children and her being alive in 1683 all come from the genealogical dictionary.