♀Elizabeth Colson

Elizabeth Colson (4 March 1722/23 – 4 March 1798) was the wife of Samuel Hovey of Weymouth, Massachusetts, for fifty-four years, and the mother of their six children. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Sarah Hovey (1747–1805).

Early life

Elizabeth Colson was born at Weymouth on 4 March 1722/23, a daughter of John and Susanna Colson. A history of Weymouth published in 1923 gives her mother as Susannah Lincoln of Hingham and her father as a glazier who lived at Hingham until he bought a house and land in Weymouth in 1711/12. The same history prints a family account by her nephew Thomas Vinson, which says that John Colson was born on the island of Bermuda in 1681 and settled in Weymouth, near the Abington line, about 1700.

Her father made his will on 3 May 1749 and died in 1752. The will, recorded in the Suffolk County probate register, calls him “John Colson of Weymouth … Glazier” and gives “my Daughter Susanna Ager two pounds Old Tenor … with what she hath Already had”, followed by “Item I Give to my Daughter Elizabeth Hovey two” pounds. The 1923 history, abstracting the same will, has Elizabeth’s £2 “on like condition”, and adds £150 for his youngest daughter Sarah. Elizabeth, in other words, had already received something from him before he wrote the will.

Marriage and family

On 2 September 1741, at the age of eighteen, she married Samuel Hovey at Weymouth, a man of the town four years her elder. The couple had six children, Joanna, Ebenezer, Sarah, Elizabeth, Chloe and Samuel, the eldest born in 1742 and the youngest in 1761. Their daughter Sarah married Nicholas Blanchard at Weymouth on 6 March 1765.

Widowhood and death

A history of Weymouth published in 1923 dates her husband’s will 8 April 1793, when their son Ebenezer was already dead, and abstracts bequests to her as his wife. The will itself, recorded in the Norfolk County probate register, leaves “my daughter, Sarah Blanchard, to her heirs and assigns four pounds, at the decease of my wife,” and names “my daughter, Elizabeth Agar,” “my daughter, Cloe Atwood,” “my daughter, Joanna Hovey” and “the legal heirs of my son, Ebenezer Hovey, deceased”; the residue goes to “my son, Samuel Hovey,” “my only & sole Executor.” He died on 9 February 1796. The same history records that Elizabeth in turn left bequests to the same children and to three grandchildren, Sarah, Samuel and Ebenezer Hovey, the children of her dead son Ebenezer. She died at Weymouth on 4 March 1798, aged 75, two years after her husband, and like him was commemorated by a gravestone in the same Weymouth burial ground.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Sarah and her son Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Samuel Hovey and Elizabeth Colson. From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one.

Notes

The town’s register of deaths enters her as “Elizabeth, wid. Daniel”, aged 75, on 4 March 1798, and the gravestone reading printed with the same entry calls her the wife of Capt. Samuel, “in 75th y.”. Her age fits the Elizabeth Colson born on 4 March 1722/23 who married Samuel Hovey, and the printed Weymouth marriages hold no marriage of a Daniel Hovey to an Elizabeth. The entry is therefore most likely hers; the records do not explain the name Daniel.

Her birth date is in the Old Style calendar. With the eleven days dropped by the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750^W, she died eleven days short of her seventy-fifth birthday, which agrees with the gravestone; the town entry gives 75.

Her mother’s maiden name and her father’s origin come from the 1923 history and the family account it prints; the town’s record of her birth gives only her parents’ first names. The passages quoted above from her father’s will come from the probate register; the other bequests are the history’s. Her husband’s will is recorded in the probate register, but the register entry does not show its date, which comes from the history; no record of her own will is known.