♀Hannah Pratt

Hannah Pratt was the wife of Joseph Hovey (1653–1693), a settler of Hadley, on the Connecticut River, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and the mother of the children born to them there in the 1680s. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, through two of her sons.

Marriage and family

A Hovey family genealogy published in 1913 gives the marriage of Joseph Hovey and Hannah Pratt, a daughter of Richard and Mary Pratt of Malden, on 31 May 1677. Her father Richard Pratt’s own will, made in May 1691, bears out the parentage: it leaves forty shillings to “my Grand child James Hovey ye son of my Daughter Hannah”.

The couple made their home at Hadley. Their son Ebenezer was born at Hadley on 5 November 1680, a daughter Hannah on 21 November 1682 and a son John on 22 August 1684, each entered in the town’s births as a child of Joseph and Hannah Hovey. The genealogy counts seven children in all: Joseph, born in February 1677/78, then Ebenezer, Hannah, John, Caleb and Thomas, and last James, born about 1691.

Milton

In 1690, by the 1913 genealogy, the family left Hadley for Milton, south of Boston. Joseph died three years later; administration of his estate was granted on 9 June 1693 to his brother John Hovey, senior, of Topsfield, and the estate, worth a little over £11, was declared insolvent. Hannah probably died before 6 May 1691, the date of her father’s will, which names his three daughters then living and not her. The records do not say whether she married again.

Lines of descent

Joseph Hovey and Hannah Pratt stand ten generations above Nancy Jane Blanchard on three lines. Two run through their son Ebenezer Hovey (born 1680) and meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Ebenezer. The third runs through their son John Hovey (1684–1714) and comes down to Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942). She and Wesley’s son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) were the parents of Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy Jane Blanchard’s father, in whom all three lines meet.

Notes

Her first name is on record: the Hadley town clerk entered Ebenezer, Hannah and John as children of Joseph and Hannah Hovey, Ebenezer as “Ebenezer Son of Joseph & Hannah Hovey Borne Novemb 5 1680”. Her surname, her parents, the marriage date, the move to Milton, the four other children and the settlement of her husband’s estate come from The Hovey Book of the Daniel Hovey Association (1913), which gives John’s birth as 21 August 1684 against the town record’s 22 August. The 1879 Charlestown genealogy agrees that Joseph Hovey of Hadley married Hannah Pratt, and prints an abstract of Richard Pratt’s will; the will itself survives in the Middlesex County probate records.

Her death

The date is an inference, not a statement. Her father Richard Pratt’s will, dated 6 May 1691 in the Middlesex probate records 1689 to 1694 (Wyman’s 1879 Charlestown genealogy prints 8 May), names his three daughters then living, Mary, Elizabeth and Martha, and leaves a legacy to his grandson James Hovey, Hannah’s son. Hannah is left out of that list, which suggests she had died by then.