♀Hannah (surname unknown)

Hannah, whose maiden name is not on record, was the wife of Samuel Kingsley of Braintree in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and was widowed in May 1662 while expecting the son through whom her line continues. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Samuel Kingsley (1662–1713).

Family

The town records of Braintree name five children of Samuel and Hannah Kingsley between 1656 and 1662: two daughters, Hannah and Elizabeth, born in 1656 and 1657; Mary and a first son named Samuel, who both died young, in 1659 and early 1661; and a second Samuel. Samuel Kingsley died on 21 May 1662, by the Billerica vital records, where a duplicate entry gives 12 May. His son Samuel was born on 6 August 1662, less than three months after his father’s death, and the Braintree records enter the birth as that of the “son of Samuel & Hanna”.

Maiden name

The Braintree entries give her first name only. A compiled genealogy of the Great Migration^W identifies her as Hannah Brackett, a daughter of Richard Brackett and Alice Blower of Braintree, baptized at Boston on 4 January 1634/5, and states that she married again, by 1665, John Blanchard. She was his second wife, and he is said to have died in 1694. A published index of New England marriages and a Mayflower genealogy of the Cooke family also call her Hannah Brackett. No record of her own family names her Brackett, and the same Braintree records name a different girl, Hanna Brackett, the daughter of Peter Brackett and Priscilla.

Death

She most likely died at Dunstable, in what is now New Hampshire, on 3 July 1706, when she was killed in an Indian attack on the town, together with a daughter, probably Elizabeth.

Notes

Death at Dunstable

The date and place come from the Dunstable town records as printed by Charles J. Fox in History of the Old Township of Dunstable (Nashua, 1846), p. 83. The record has “Mrs. Hannah Blanchard dyed on July the 3rd at night in the year 1706”, and the same night it names “Goody Cummings, the wife of John Cummings”. The record gives the death but no cause. That the attack killed her and her daughter is the compiled account, which is why the sentence above carries a hedge.

Identity of the widow

Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, volume 1, and Stearns (1911), pp. 3–4, identify this Mrs. Hannah Blanchard as the widow of Samuel Kingsley; Stearns prints the name “Kinsley”. Richard Brackett’s will, dated 29 January 1688/9, leaves “my daughter Hannah Blancher” twenty shillings, but it does not name Kingsley, so the link rests on the compilers’ reading.

Elizabeth and “Goody Cummings”

“Goody Cummings” is taken to be Elizabeth Kingsley, who is given as marrying John Cummings on 13 September 1680 in a compiled genealogy, Woolson-Fenno (1907). The Cummings Genealogy notes a rival parentage for her. The identification is not settled.

Second marriage

Stearns (1911), pp. 3–4, prints that Deacon John Blanchard “married, second, Mrs. Hannah (Brackett) Kinsley … widow of Samuel Kinsley”, and gives his death as 1694. Anderson’s volume gives the marriage as by 1665. The will printed in the Granite Monthly in July 1906 names a wife “Hanna”.