♀Elizabeth Hersey

Elizabeth Hersey was the wife of Moses Gilman (1630/31–1702), a landholder and selectman of Exeter, New Hampshire. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Caleb Gilman (1678–1766).

The Essex County court papers for a suit of March 1678 show her at Exeter as Moses’s wife in 1677. He had written to her asking her to have 12,000 feet of boards rafted for Thomas Woodbridge, and the deliveries were sworn on 26 November 1677.

Her surname comes from two compiled genealogies rather than a record. A history of the Gilman family published in 1869 calls her a daughter of William Hersie, senior, and the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire gives her as Elizabeth Hersey, a sister of Judith Hersey, a daughter of William Hersey baptized at Hingham in 1638; neither book gives the date of her marriage. The Genealogical Dictionary adds that a letter from Moses to her was printed in the published records of the Essex County quarterly courts, and that his will named her. As his widow she made deeds to three of her sons, which the 1869 history records at Exeter: on 11 June 1712 “Elizabeth widow of Moses” conveyed a saw-mill to her son Caleb, in a deed that names her daughters Elizabeth Dudley, Mary Connor and Judith Lyford, and in 1714 she made deeds to her sons James, on 25 March, and John, on 20 April. According to the Genealogical Dictionary she was living in 1714; neither book gives the date of her death.