♀Elizabeth (surname unknown)

Elizabeth, whose surname is not known, was the wife of William Stickney, one of the first settlers of Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts, where she bore seven children between 1640 and 1649, two pairs of them twins. She was most likely the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Stickney (born 1640).

Boston and Rowley

On 6 January 1638/9, by the Boston church records printed in a family genealogy of 1869, William Stickney and his wife Elizabeth were admitted to the First Church in Boston^W, he as “a husbandman”, and on 24 November 1639 the church dismissed him with three other members to gather a new church at Rowley. By the same account they had brought three children from England, Samuel, Amos and Mary. Nothing is known of Elizabeth’s own family or of when she married; that genealogy could not find her surname, and her age in a deposition it prints puts her birth about 1608.

At Rowley the town recorded seven more children born to William and Elizabeth between 1640 and 1649: John, Faith, Andrew, and two pairs of twins, Thomas and Elizabeth, born on 3 March 1646, and Adding and Mercy, born on 14 January 1648. A twin of each pair died young: Elizabeth was buried on 4 December 1659 and Adding on 17 September 1660. By the 1869 account she joined her husband in selling land to Jeremiah Elsworth in 1660 and forty acres of Merrimack land to James Barker in 1662.

Widow

William made his will on 21 January 1664 and was buried at Rowley four days later, on 25 January; eight of their ten children were then living, Samuel, Amos, John, Andrew, Thomas, Mary, Faith and Mercy. The will, proved at Ipswich on 28 March 1665, made Elizabeth, his “well beloved wife”, his sole executrix and left her for life the house, barn, orchard and Rowley lands, two cows, a third of the household goods of her own choosing and a room “for her owne particular use”. Their son John, who was to inherit the homestead after her, was to pay her three pounds ten shillings a year and winter her cows. The twin Mercy was buried at Rowley on 14 January 1676.

Elizabeth was still living in 1678. On 24 September that year, in a deposition sworn in court at Ipswich and printed in the 1869 genealogy, “Elizabeth Stickney aged about 70” and her eldest son Samuel testified that when her daughter Mary married James Barker the younger, his father had promised to give him a portion equal to any of his other children but the eldest, and had never done so. Mary and James had married at Rowley in 1667. When Elizabeth died is not known.

Notes

The seven Rowley births and the burials of the twins Elizabeth, Adding and Mercy, and of William, are in Rowley’s printed vital records, which name the parents William and Elizabeth (John’s entry spells her Elisabeth); the marriage of Mary to James Barker junior is there too, with a note from the court records that she was William’s daughter. John’s birth on 14 March 1640 is the only Rowley birth of a John Stickney before 1660. The records number months from March, and the year then began on 25 March, so William’s burial, printed as 25 January 1664 with no second year, falls in January 1665 by modern reckoning, as the proving of the will on 28 March 1665 confirms; the birth of Adding and Mercy, printed as 14 January 1648, likewise falls in 1649. No burial for Elizabeth has been found in Rowley’s printed death records.

The church admission, the deeds, the will and the deposition rest on Matthew Adams Stickney’s The Stickney Family (1869), which prints the church entries, abstracts the deeds with references to the Essex County deed books, and gives copies of the will from the Essex probate files and of the deposition from the Essex deeds. The will is printed again, from the county’s probate files, in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, volume II (1917), pages 5 to 8, and the two transcripts agree; the originals have not been examined for this account. The 1869 book states that “the surname of his wife” had “not been ascertained”; the 1865 monument over William’s grave at Rowley names her only as Elizabeth. The births of Samuel, Amos and Mary in England, about 1633, 1635 and 1637, come from the 1869 book alone. Her age of about 70 in 1678 gives a birth about 1608.