♂Jabez Clough

Jabez Clough (born 24 April 1723) was the eldest son to grow up in the family of the millwright^W Zacheus Clough and Sarah Page, born at Salisbury, Essex, Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was the fifth great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Benjamin Clough (born 1740), Nancy Jane’s fifth great-grandfather.

Early life

Jabez was the fourth of the eleven children born to Zacheus and Sarah at Salisbury between 1716 and 1740. Two of his brothers, the first Benjamin (born 1716) and the first Zacheus (born 1725), died in childhood, which left Jabez the senior boy of the household; the youngest, the second Benjamin, was not born until Jabez was seventeen. By 1752 the family had moved north across the provincial line to Brentwood in the Province of New Hampshire^W.

The will of 1752

On 15 December 1752 Zacheus made his will at Brentwood, and Jabez, then twenty-nine, was named in it as a son. He was left twenty shillings. The bulk of the estate went to “my other two sons Zaccheus & Benjamin”, both still under twenty-one, and each of the daughters was to have fifteen pounds. The will was proved on 11 August 1757.

The 1952 genealogy of the descendants of John Clough of Salisbury abstracts the will with further clauses that make Jabez a father by 1752: a grandson Moses, son of Jabez, was to have fifteen acres beside land already given to his father, and Moses’s sisters Mary, Sarah and Miriam were to have legacies. Those clauses rest on the genealogy alone.

Notes

The records here give Jabez’s birth and his place in his father’s will; his later life is not set out in them. His wife, his death and the later lives of Moses, Mary, Sarah and Miriam are not recorded in them.

Another man of the name turns up in Maine. A history of Augusta published in 1870 says a Jabez Clough of Readfield married Mary Savage on 14 July 1774, and an index of Maine births gives a Noah, born at Readfield on 26 May 1784, as the son of a Jabez Clough. Nothing ties any of these to the Jabez born at Salisbury in 1723, and the Readfield man would have been fifty-one at his marriage.