♀Grizzel Strange

Grizzel Strange was the wife of Thomas Fish of Portsmouth, in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations^W, whom she married in December 1668, and the mother of five children born there between 1671 and 1684; two of her great-great-grandchildren later married each other. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Preserved Fish (born 1679).

Life

Her birth and death are not recorded in the family record. A history of the Fish family published in 1948 quotes the Portsmouth town record of the marriage: “Thomas fish of the Town of Portsmouth, junior, was married unto Grizzigon Strange, daughter of John of the said Portsmouth on the 16th of Dec. 1668.” The entry names her father only as John of Portsmouth; the book’s own family entry gives the day as 10 December 1668 and names her parents as John and Alice Strange. A compiled genealogy of Rhode Island families, published in 1887, lists her as a daughter of John Strange, a hatter of Portsmouth, with two brothers, John and Lot, whom it names as his sons from abstracts of his deeds of 1684 and 1687. It shows John’s wife in 1683 and 1687 as an Alice, but nothing seen names Alice as Grizzel’s mother. The clerk wrote her name Grizzigon, and the births index gives it as Grizigan or Grizigon; the tree uses Grizzel, the form in the family book and in the town record’s own entry for her daughter of that name.

Marriage and children

The same town record, as the book quotes it, lists five children of Thomas and Grizzel born at Portsmouth between 1671 and 1684: Alice, Grizzel, Hope, Preserved and Mehitable. The index of Rhode Island town births gives each of the five at Portsmouth, with Thomas Fish and Grizigan or Grizigon as the parents, and Preserved’s birth on 12 August 1679 also appears in the printed vital records of Rhode Island, where the parents’ names are read as Thomas and Grizigan. Preserved was the only son, according to the 1948 book, and the line to the Curtis family runs through him.

A typescript Fish pedigree dates the marriage to 1683, four years after Preserved’s birth; the town record quoted in the 1948 book gives 1668, which fits the births of the children.

Her husband died at Portsmouth about 1684. The youngest child, Mehitable, was born on 22 July 1684, a date given by both the town record and the births index; it falls after a deed of 2 May 1684 that, as the book reports it, settled her father’s dwelling on Preserved, and most likely after her father’s death, though no record fixes the day of his death.

Lines of descent

Both lines of descent run through Preserved Fish, who married Ruth Cook at Portsmouth. Their son Thomas Fish (1703–1786) settled at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where his daughter Elizabeth Fish (1736–1814) was born; Elizabeth’s daughter was Waite Allen (1766–1850). Their daughter Amy Fish (1705–1748) married James Akin of Dartmouth; her daughter Ruth Akin (1731–1821) was the mother of Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828). Batchelder Sherman and Waite Allen, second cousins, married each other, and the two lines meet again in their daughter Salena Sherman (1806–1842).