♀Lydia Royce

Lydia Royce (6 June 1767 – 1 December 1851) was the second child born in the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, a year after its first families arrived, and became the wife of Uriah Howard (1763–1845), a Revolutionary War soldier, with whom she had thirteen children between 1784 and 1811 before the family settled at Phillips, Maine. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Sybil Howard (1784–1864).

Early life and marriage

The New Hampshire record of births gives Lydia Royce as born at Hanover, on the Connecticut River, on 6 June 1767, the daughter of Benjamin Royce and his wife Seble; a sister, Naomi, was born there in July 1769. Her age on her gravestone, 84 years and 6 months, agrees with that date almost to the week. Her first daughter was given her mother’s name, Sybil. Hanover lies next to Lyme, where a Uriah Howard was the head of a household of four in the census of 1790.

In her widow’s claim Lydia swore that she married Uriah on 20 May 1783 at Dorchester, New Hampshire, a hill town north of Hanover; she was then two weeks short of sixteen, and the pension office accepted the date as “satisfactorily established”. Their daughter Sybil was born on 26 September 1784.

Children and Maine

The town’s record of births at Phillips, as indexed, lists the couple’s children: Sybil in 1784, Roswell in 1786, twin sons Charles and George in August 1789, David in 1790, Lydia in 1793, Daniel in 1796, Wait in 1798, Uriah in 1801, Eddeline in 1803, Delinda in 1806, Darius in 1808 and Hulda in 1811. Charles died that October, and Wait died in 1814 at the age of fifteen. The early births were written into the Phillips book after the family arrived; Roswell was later recorded in the census as born in New Hampshire, and a history of Maine place names records that Uriah came to Phillips from Buckfield about 1805.

After Uriah’s death in 1845 Lydia applied for a widow’s pension on his war service, and in July 1848, then living at Phillips and aged eighty-one, she applied again under the new act of that year, signing with her mark. She died at Phillips on 1 December 1851 and was buried in Riverside Cemetery beside him, on the lot where her daughter Sybil was later buried too. Her estate was administered by the Franklin County probate court in April 1852, under file no. 497, “Estate of Lydia Howard, Phillips”; the papers of that file do not survive, only its cover.

Notes

The town’s historian, writing in 1891, records that the first child born in Hanover was Otis Freeman, on 25 May 1767, and the second a child of Benjamin Royce, born on 6 June; he gives the family name as “Royce (or Rice)”, and a lineage application of 1942 gives her maiden name as Rice. The same historian has her father dying in 1775, when she was eight, though a Benjamin Rice who may be the same man signed a petition of the Dorchester and Lyme district in 1781 and headed a household at Lyme in 1790. Her birth rests on the indexed New Hampshire record.