♀Jedidah Hawes

Jedidah Hawes (30 July 1709 – 22 December 1764) was a woman of Martha’s Vineyard who married Jabez Sherman, a shipwright of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and raised eleven children there. The one possession of hers that the records mention is a pair of pewter platters, which her husband’s will passed to their daughter Experience ten years after her death. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Henry Shearman (1730–1805).

Early life

Jedidah was born at Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, then part of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay, on 30 July 1709, a daughter of Benjamin Hawes (1683–1722) and Dorcas Smith (1687–1730). A compiled genealogy of the descendants of John Howland, the Mayflower passenger, prints the family in an allied-family section: her father, born at Yarmouth on Cape Cod, married Dorcas Smith “of Martha’s Vineyard” on 24 July 1705, and the couple had six children, of whom Jedidah was the second. The same compilation names her sisters and brothers as Experience, who married Shubael Claghorn; Benjamin; Samuel, who later moved to Dartmouth; and two boys named Shubael, the first of whom died as an infant in 1722, a few months before the second was born. Her father died in 1722, when she was thirteen, and her mother in August 1730.

A study of the English ancestry of the Hawes family, published in the 1910s, states that her grandmother Desire Gorham was a granddaughter of John Howland of the Mayflower, and a Sherman family card file compiled in 1913 says that Jedidah was of “Mayflower” ancestry. The standard Howland genealogy confirms that Howland’s daughter Desire married John Gorham and settled at Yarmouth, but no record of the link between that couple and her grandmother is known, so the descent remains a claim of the compilations.

Marriage and family

In 1726 she married Jabez Sherman (1700–1774) at Dartmouth, in Bristol County. The Dartmouth register records eleven children of Jabez and Jedidah, born between 1728 and 1750: eight sons, Fortunatus, Henry, Benjamin, Prince, Jabez, Abishai, Elihu and Isaac, and three daughters, Deborah, Experience and Jedidah. The eldest was born when she was nineteen and the youngest when she was forty. She lived to see several of them married: Henry to Ruth Akin in 1749, Fortunatus to Sarah Delano in 1753 and Deborah to Jonathan Hathaway in 1754, and the intentions of Benjamin to marry Deborah Delano and of Experience to marry Wesson Tallman were recorded in 1758 and 1760.

Jedidah died at Dartmouth on 22 December 1764 and was buried there. Her gravestone reads “In memory of Jedidah the Wife of Jabez Sherman who died December the 22d AD 1764 in the 56th Year” of her age, which agrees with a birth in July 1709. Jabez outlived her by ten years, and the will he made in June 1774 names no wife. It left Experience, by then Experience Tallman, a case of drawers, a small table, a small desk “and Two Pewter Platters that were her Mother[’s]”.

Notes

A genealogical index lists a marriage for Jedidah Hawes at Dartmouth on 17 June 1758, with no husband named. It cannot be hers, since she was the wife of Jabez Sherman from 1726 until her death. The date is that of the marriage intention of her son Benjamin and Deborah Delano, recorded at Dartmouth on 17 June 1758, which the index attached to his mother.

A family pedigree compiled in 1994 gives her death year as 1761; her gravestone and the Dartmouth records give 1764. The printed Dartmouth deaths volume also lists a second gravestone for a Jedidah Sherman, dated only 1764, and treats it as a separate entry; whether the two are one woman is unresolved.

The year of the marriage, 1726, comes from compiled family trees; no entry for the marriage itself has been found. The compiled Howland genealogy gives her father’s death as October 1722, while other records give 28 November 1722.