♀Hannah Jefts

Hannah Jefts (4 February 1654/55 – 21 January 1729/30) was the wife of Andrew Spaulding (1652–1713), a yeoman and deacon of the church at Chelmsford, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Andrew Spaulding (1678–1753).

Birth and family

The Billerica vital records enter her birth on 4 February 1654/55 as the daughter of Henry and Hannah Jefts; a second copy of the entry gives 14 February. Her parents had lost an earlier daughter named Hannah in May 1653, and her mother died in 1662, when Hannah was seven. Her father lived until 1700 and died at Billerica aged about 94. He named her “Hannah Spalding” in his will of 4 March 1691/2, as a printed abstract gives it.

Marriage and children

On 30 April 1674 Andrew Spaulding married Hannah Jefts at Chelmsford; the town’s marriage records write her name Hanah Jefes and call her the daughter of Henry, of Billerica. The Chelmsford records name nine children of Andrew and Hannah: a daughter Hannah, who died in March 1677, then Andrew, born on 25 March 1678, Henry, John, Rachel, William, Joanna, Benoni and Mary, who died in July 1698 before her third birthday.

Widowhood and death

A Spalding family genealogy published in 1897 prints her husband’s will of 6 June 1712, which left her his homestead and all his movable estate, the housing and lands to be hers for her lifetime and then divided among all their children, and named her his “whole and sole executrix”. Andrew died on 5 May 1713. Hannah died a widow on 21 January 1729/30; the Chelmsford death records enter her as the widow of Deacon Andrew. She was buried in the Forefathers’ Burying Ground at Chelmsford, where her gravestone gives her age as in her 77th year, about two years more than her recorded birth would make her.

Notes

Father’s will

The will of Henry Jefts is dated 4 March 1691/2 and was proved on 17 June 1700. The name “Hannah Spalding” comes from a printed abstract of it in Pope’s English and Scotch Immigrant Ancestors of the Clapp-Cheney Family (1900), page 41. Crane’s Historic Homes and Institutions of Worcester County (1907) and Cutter (1908) give the same dates. The original will is not cited, so the statement rests on a compiled abstract. The abstract prints the surname as Spalding; the tree and this site spell it Spaulding.

Burial and the gravestone

The Chelmsford vital records enter her death as “Hannah, wid. Dea. Andrew, Jan. 21, 1729-30. [in her 77th y. G. R. 1.]”, and the key to the volume explains “G. R. 1.” as the gravestone record for the Forefathers’ Burying Ground. Waters’s history of Chelmsford (1917), in its list of interments, prints the stone as “Age, 77 yrs.”, a year more than the register’s count. The stone’s age is the one figure in these sources that does not fit the Billerica birth entry of 4 February 1654/55. That entry is kept as her birth date, since an elder daughter Hannah of the same parents died in May 1653.