♀Elizabeth Fish

Elizabeth Fish (4 June 1736 – before 26 March 1814) was born at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, married Elisha Allen, and raised a family of twelve that moved from Dutchess County to Cambridge, New York. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Waite Allen (1766–1850).

Family and early life

The Dartmouth town register records her birth as “Elizebeth, d. Thomas and Mercy, June 4, 1736”. It lists her brothers and sisters on the same page: Lydia, Wait, Amie, Preserved, John and Caleb, born between 1725 and 1740. Her father, Thomas Fish (1703–1786), was born at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, a son of Preserved Fish and Ruth Cook. Her mother, Mercy Coggeshall (1704–1778), came from a Newport and Portsmouth family, and Mercy’s own mother named “Mercy Fish, wife of Thomas Fish of Dartmouth” in a will proved in 1747. A family history published in 1948 records that Thomas and Mercy later moved to the “Oblong”, the strip of land along the Connecticut border in Dutchess County, New York, where Mercy died in 1778 and Thomas about 1786.

Lines of descent

The Portsmouth register also shows that Thomas’s sister Amey married James Akin. Elizabeth was therefore a first cousin of their daughter Ruth Akin, who married Henry Shearman. A generation later the two families joined again when Elizabeth’s daughter Waite married Ruth’s son Batchelder Sherman, so that the couple were second cousins. Such marriages were common among the Quaker families of Dartmouth and the Oblong, whose meetings disowned members who married outside the Society of Friends.

Marriage and Cambridge

Elizabeth married Elisha Allen (born 1722) in 1752 at the Oblong. Their eldest son, John, was born that November, when she was sixteen. The couple had twelve children. The family later moved north to Cambridge, in what became Washington County, New York, where Elisha served as an assessor for the Cambridge district in 1777. Several of the children married into neighboring families such as the Deuels, Gilberts and Macombers.

Elisha signed his will in September 1801, and it was proved in June 1802. He named “my beloved wife Elizabeth Allen”, and ten of the children appear in the surviving text, among them Waite. Elizabeth outlived him by about a decade. Her own will was signed on 24 December 1812 and proved at Salem, Washington County, on 26 March 1814, so she died between those two dates. The will describes her as Elizabeth Allen of Cambridge, widow of Elisha Allen, and leaves bequests to her children, among them her daughter Waite. A compiled cemetery record gives Cambridge as her burial place.

Notes

One compiled family history gives her birth as 20 June 1725, as a daughter of Robert Fish and Ann Palmer. The Dartmouth register’s entry for Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas and Mercy, born 4 June 1736, contradicts it. The 1725 date would also make her fifty-two at the birth of her youngest child in 1777.