♂John Hovey

John Hovey (22 August 1684 – 13 September 1714) was a colonist of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, born at Hadley on the Connecticut River, who made his home at Cambridge and died there at thirty, two months after the birth of his youngest son. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Hovey (1707–1773).

Hadley and Cambridge

He was born at Hadley on 22 August 1684, a son of Joseph Hovey and Hannah Pratt. A Hovey family genealogy published in 1913 has the family leave Hadley for Milton in 1690, and his father die in the summer of 1693, when John was eight. A genealogy of Charlestown families published in 1879 records that he was baptized as an adult on 16 April 1704.

By the 1913 genealogy’s account he was living at Cambridge while still young and worked there as a baker. The 1913 Hovey genealogy gives John Hovey’s marriage in 1706 to Abiel, whom it calls Abiel Watson of Cambridge; her maiden name is not known, and “Watson” appears to be the name of her third husband. On 1 April 1709, when he was still described as of Charlestown, the same genealogy records that he bought the old Blue Anchor tavern at Cambridge from his brother Joseph Hovey for £145, at a corner of Mount Auburn Street, and that he afterwards kept the tavern himself.

He was adding to his land in the last months of his life. The genealogy traces a purchase on 6 May 1714 of thirty-one and a half acres on the southwest side of the Charles River from John Stedman, a Cambridge tailor, for £189, and a sale later that month of an acre and a half of marsh to Richard Ward of Newton, in a deed that calls him a yeoman.

The couple had five children. Their eldest son, John, born on 12 June 1707, and a daughter, Sarah, born on 28 February 1708/9, were born at Charlestown according to two compiled town histories, which is most likely why neither is in the Cambridge birth records. Three more sons, Thomas, James and Ebenezer, were registered at Cambridge as sons of John and Abiel, the youngest born on 12 July 1714, and Sarah died at Cambridge on 11 October 1720, in her twelfth year. By the 1913 genealogy’s account, Thomas became a physician and died unmarried at the English factory on the Gambia River in Africa in April 1732, James a joiner, preacher and justice of the peace at Plymouth, and Ebenezer a housewright, who died at Watertown in 1742.

Death and estate

He died on 13 September 1714, by the 1913 genealogy, and was buried in the Old Burying Ground^W at Cambridge, where his gravestone, as the genealogy prints it, gave his age as “Aged 30 Years 1 Month and 3 Weekes”. His estate, in the genealogy’s abstract of the probate, was valued at £389 0s 8d, and his house had a hall, a kitchen and a parlour, each with a chamber above, and garrets. Abiel was appointed administratrix on 10 December 1715, and the probate court assigned the real estate to the eldest son, John.

In November 1736, by the 1913 genealogy’s account of the Middlesex deeds, Abiel and her third husband, Isaac Watson, sold her interest in John Hovey’s estate to her son John for thirty pounds; the same day he bought his brother Ebenezer’s share, and his brother James sold him his a year later.

Notes

The Hadley town record gives his birth as 22 August 1684; the 1913 genealogy (The Hovey Book, published by the Daniel Hovey Association) gives 21 August. The age on his gravestone, thirty years, one month and three weeks, fits either date.

His trade, the tavern, his land dealings, his death date, the gravestone, the estate and the deeds of 1736 and 1737 are all from the 1913 genealogy, which cites the Middlesex and Essex deed books for the land. The printed Cambridge vital records name John and Abiel as the parents of Thomas (1710), James (1712) and Ebenezer (1714), and record Sarah’s death in 1720, but they do not print the births of the eldest son, John, in 1707 or of Sarah in 1708/9; the town histories by Wyman (1879) and Paige (1877) place those two at Charlestown. The link between this couple and the Reverend John Hovey of Arundel rests on a deed recorded in 1736, in which Ebenezer Hovey of Cambridge, housewright, for seventy pounds sold “all my Right Title share and Proportion which I any way had to the Estate of our Honoured Father John Hovey of said Town decd” to “John Hovey of the Town aforesaid my Brother”; on the same page of the Middlesex deeds, “Mr Isaac Watson and Mrs Abiel Watson” acknowledged at Cambridge on 14 December 1736 their release to John Hovey. Ebenezer is the son the printed Cambridge vital records register as “s. of John and Abiel” on 12 July 1714, so the deeds tie the family to the John Hovey of Cambridge who is named as heir; that this John is the eldest son, the Reverend John Hovey born in 1707, is the 1913 genealogy’s identification. The 1879 Charlestown genealogy (Thomas Bellows Wyman, The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown) also lists a son John, born on 12 June and baptized on 15 June 1707, among the children of John Hovey and his wife Abiel, though it leaves her maiden name blank and names Isaac Watson as her third husband; Paige’s history does the same.