♀Hannah Brocklebank

Hannah Brocklebank (born 28 March 1659) was a woman of Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts, who married John Stickney there in 1680 and had seven children recorded in the town’s births between 1681 and 1700. She was most likely the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Stickney (born 1686).

The captain’s daughter

Hannah was born at Rowley on 28 March 1659, a daughter of Samuel and Hannah Brocklebank. A family genealogy published in 1869 makes her father the Captain Samuel Brocklebank who led Rowley men in King Philip’s War^W. The same book has him impressing twelve of them on 29 November 1675, John Stickney among them, and records that John Stickney was in the fight at Sudbury^W on 21 April 1676, in which his captain, Samuel Brocklebank, was killed, and four years later married the captain’s daughter Hannah. She was seventeen when her father died.

His death left her a share of his estate. On 26 September 1676, when her mother brought the inventory into the county court at Ipswich, the court ordered £80 paid to her eldest brother, Samuel, and £40 to each of the six other children, Joseph, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary, Sarah and Jane, as they came of age or married. Three more children of the household had died young: her brothers Francis and John, both buried in July 1660, when she was a year old, and a first sister named Sarah, in 1667.

In May 1701 John and Hannah, with her sister Mary and Mary’s husband William Dole, sold 26 acres of woodland that had come to them “as part of our wives portion out of Capt. Brocklebank estate”. By that October her mother was dead, and on 9 October 1701 the captain’s children agreed on the final division of the estate. John Stickney signed it with her brothers Samuel and Joseph, her sisters Sarah and Jane, and the husbands of her four sisters, William Dole, John Tod, Nathaniel Coffin and Abiel Somerby; his own share was land by the little pond towards Bradford, upland beside the west end ox pasture and four acres in the common fields.

Marriage and family

John Stickney and Hannah Brocklebank were married at Rowley on 9 June 1680, an entry the town’s printed vital records give as “John, and Hanah Brocklbanke”. Over the next twenty years seven children were born to them there: Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary, Samuel, Sarah, Jane and John, the last in January 1699-1700.

By the 1869 account Hannah was admitted to the church at Rowley on 23 June 1695, and the children were baptized there. Her husband was by then a lieutenant and one of the town’s officers, and he worked as a carpenter. When he sold a freehold in 1707, “with consent of Hannah his wife”, she put her mark beside his signature.

Widow

John had died by 4 April 1709, when his will was proved at Ipswich and the register’s record of the proof calls him late of Rowley and deceased. She was sole executrix. The register’s copy of the will names “my Eldest Son Samuel” and “my youngest Son John” and leaves the daughters equal shares. The 1869 book dates the will’s signing to 26 February 1708-9, “being Weak of body”, and gives Hannah half of his lands and housing for her widowhood and half of his movables. Its text of the will also gives her power to sell a wood lot “for and toward finishing of new house”, and on the book’s account he died with a house unfinished. In January 1711-12, the book records, she sold fifteen acres of his woodland to her son-in-law Richard Dole of Newbury, against £30 already laid out on the frame.

The 1869 book dates the division of the land to 13 October 1712, “according to his Will to ye Widow and among ye Children”, and prints it in full. Hannah took the easterly end of the house and barn with half the home lot, Samuel, “the elder son”, the westerly end with the other half, and John, “ye youngest son”, a share of the ox pasture and the marsh. The daughters follow, the married ones under their husbands’ names: Hannah Sawer, the eldest, Mary Palmer, Elizabeth Dole, Sarah Stickney, and Jane, the youngest.

Hannah lived on in Rowley for decades. In 1732 she joined her daughter Jane and Jane’s husband Timothy Palmer in selling land in the town’s west-end ox pasture, and she was still selling land in 1740, at the age of eighty-one. She died on 23 April 1749, forty years after her husband. The record of deaths kept for Byfield Parish enters her as “Hannah Stickney, Widow. April 23, 1749. An Antient Woman, above 90 years”; she had turned ninety the month before.

Lines of descent

The 1712 division is the document that ties the line to John and Hannah. Its “Mary Palmer” is the Mary Stickney born to them at Rowley on 1 March 1686, who married John Palmer there on 18 November 1709; she was the only Mary Stickney born at Rowley old enough to have married by 1712. The division is known here from the 1869 book’s transcript; the division’s own probate record is not cited here. The next step, from Mary to her daughter Hannah Palmer (born 1719), rests on elimination rather than on a record naming Hannah’s parents, which is why the line is given as most likely.

Notes

Hannah’s birth (“Hanah (Brocklbank), d. Samuell and Hannah, Mar. 28, 1659”), the marriage and the seven births are from the printed Vital Records of Rowley, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (1928–31). The same records carry the gravestone of a granddaughter of Captain Samuel Brocklebank, “who was slain by the Indians at Sudbury, Apr. 21, 1676”, and the burials of her brothers and first sister Sarah; the church’s own entry for her father, “Samuel, Dea., Apr. 18, 1676”, gives a different day.

The court’s order of 1676 and the heirs’ agreement of 1701 are printed from the county’s probate files in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. III (1675–1681), pp. 91–93. Her sisters Sarah and Jane signed the agreement as Sarah Coffin and Jane Sumerby, and her sister Elizabeth’s marriage to John Tod at Rowley in 1685 is in the town’s records. The 1869 book dates an agreement among the heirs, signed by John Stickney, to 17 June 1691; the agreement in the probate file is dated 9 October 1701, and whether the book’s date refers to the same document is not settled here.

The 1869 book is Matthew Adams Stickney’s The Stickney Family: A Genealogical Memoir of the Descendants of William and Elizabeth Stickney. Apart from the register’s copy of the will, everything above about Hannah’s church membership, the deeds, the will and the 1712 division comes from it; its texts of the deeds, the will and the division are transcripts with references to the Essex County probate and deed books. The register’s copy of the will is the record for the sons it names, Hannah’s executorship, the daughters’ equal shares and his death before the proof of 4 April 1709, and the book’s text agrees with that copy on those points. The day of signing is not legible on the register’s copy, so 26 February 1708-9 rests on the book alone. The deed of 1701 calls the captain “Capt. Sam’l Brocklebanke our father-in-law”, which is what makes Hannah’s father the captain. Her death is from the Byfield Parish record of deaths for 1745–1802, kept with the Ipswich parish records; the 1869 book gives the same date from the Byfield church records. The book also cites a Rowley entry for the widow Hannah Stickney, “aged about 90 years”; Rowley’s printed death records carry no entry naming her. George Thomas Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine (1909) gives the same church admission and death.