♂John Bickford

John Bickford (died 1715) was a landholder at Newington, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, and the husband of Susannah Furber. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mary Bickford (born 1693). In 1699 he and the husbands of his wife’s sisters petitioned the judge of probate to make her brother hand over the sisters’ shares of their father’s estate.

Family

John Bickford married Susannah Furber by 1685. Between 1685 and 1709 they had ten children, whose births were entered in the Dover town records: Bridget, Jethro, John, Mary, Joseph, Anna, Pierce, the twins Lemuel and Eliakim, and Dodovah. He is said to have held the rank of sergeant and to have served as a constable in 1693 and 1694, and his land lay at Long Point in Newington.

The Furber estate

Susannah’s father, William Furber of Welch Cove, in Dover, died without a will, leaving, in the petitioners’ words, a considerable estate, and her brother William kept it in his own hands. On 30 December 1699 the husbands of the Furber sisters, John Dam, John Bickford and Thomas Bickford, petitioned the judge of probate on the sisters’ behalf: their brother-in-law, they wrote, “keeps the sam Contrary to Law from his sisters & will not Render there porshons”. They asked that he be made to deliver to each sister her portion. Thomas Bickford, who signed beside him, was probably his brother. The records do not say how the matter ended.

Death and estate

John Bickford died in 1715 without a will. On 5 September 1715 his widow Susannah and their son Jethro, both of Newington, gave bond of £1,000 to administer his estate, and an inventory taken on 22 November valued it at £651 17s. When his 150 acres were divided in 1719, Susannah kept a third for her lifetime and the other two thirds went to their nine children: a double share of twenty acres to Jethro, the eldest surviving son, and ten acres to each of the others, Mary’s share going to her husband, John Walker. Susannah was guardian of the children still under age.

The division did not settle the matter. In September 1732 Mary and John Walker joined most of her brothers and her sister Anna in a complaint that Jethro, whose right came to forty acres after he had bought the shares of Joseph and Bridget, had had sixty-five acres of their father’s land laid out to himself. They asked for a new survey. The judge of probate declined to act, and the case went on appeal to the governor and council.

Notes

Sources

The petition of 1699, the bond, inventory and division of his estate, and the complaint of 1732, which states that he died intestate in 1715, are all in the published probate records of New Hampshire. The children’s births are in the Dover town records, as copied by the city clerk in 1905. His rank of sergeant, his home at Long Point and his terms as constable come from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Noyes, Libby and Davis. The dictionary gives Bridget’s birth as 30 July 1685, Jethro’s as 15 November 1689 and Mary’s as 18 August 1693; the Dover record has 30 June, 16 November and 13 August, and as the copy closer to the original, it is the one followed.

Parentage

The dictionary makes him a son of John Bickford of Oyster River and Temperance Hull, the daughter of the Reverend Joseph Hull^W, and makes Thomas Bickford, who signed the 1699 petition with him, his brother. The elder John Bickford’s deed of gift of 12 February 1685/6 names his wife Temperance and a daughter Joanna, and a petition of 1697 names his son Thomas; neither names a son John. His parentage rests on the dictionary alone.