♂John Folsom

John Folsom (baptized 3 October 1641 – died before 6 December 1715) was a colonist of Exeter, in the Province of New Hampshire^W. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mercy Folsom.

Family and marriage

He was baptized on 3 October 1641. The printed genealogies of the Folsom family make him a son of John Folsom and Mary Gilman, a parentage that rests on those genealogies alone. The first of them, published in 1882, takes the date from the diary of the minister at Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who baptized him on the same day as Samuel, whom it makes his older brother.

On 10 November 1675 he married Abigail Perkins, of Hampton. The 1882 genealogy calls her a daughter of Abraham Perkins, and a genealogical dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire, published between 1928 and 1939, gives her birth as 12 April 1655. The 1882 genealogy lists nine children born at Exeter, four sons and five daughters, the eldest of them Abigail, born on 23 December 1676; their daughter Mercy married James Dudley.

Deacon and constable

The Folsom genealogy says that the town records call him Deacon John, to tell him apart from the younger Johns of the family, and describes him as a man of “high standing and good property” who was often sent to the general assembly. The genealogical dictionary lists his service on juries, as constable in 1676 and again under Governor Edward Cranfield^W, as selectman in 1681, 1691 and 1696, and as representative in 1685, 1688, 1694 and 1695, and calls him “a pillar, both of religion and common rights”.

In 1684, as constable of Exeter, he was given a warrant to collect taxes that the governor and council had laid without the General Assembly. A history of Exeter published in 1888, drawing on the provost marshal’s own deposition, says that he returned the warrant because nearly everyone he asked answered that taxes had to be raised by the Assembly. The Court of Sessions then fined him fifty shillings for neglect of duty, and when the provost marshal, Thomas Thurton, came to Exeter to collect it, Folsom told him, by the marshal’s account, that he would meet him with “a red-hot spit and scalding water”. The 1888 history adds that a crowd hustled the marshal and his deputy from house to house and that they left without collecting anything.

The Folsom genealogy records two quarrels within the family. When his brother Samuel was made administrator of their parents’ estate in January 1692, John’s “violent language” exposed him to prosecution, though the matter was settled amicably. When his brother Nathaniel’s wife, Hannah, slandered Abigail, he complained before Commissioner Dalton and obtained a sentence that Hannah should “make acknowledgment at some public town-meeting”.

Will and death

He made his will on 24 November 1715 and died at Exeter before 6 December 1715, aged about 75, when two of the witnesses proved the will at Portsmouth before the judge of probate. The will, printed in the 1882 genealogy, left land to his sons Abraham, John, Jonathan and Jeremiah; legacies to his daughters Abigail Gilman and Sarah Stevens and to the two children of his daughter Mary, who, the genealogy says, had died before him; and a meadow of about two hundred acres to be divided between his son John and his daughters Lydia Stockman and Mercy Dudley. His wife Abigail received the use of the house, barn, sawmill, marsh and pastures for her life and all his stock and movable goods as her own, and he named her sole executrix.