♀Margaret Conant

Margaret Conant (born 3 January 1722) was a woman of Bridgewater, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who married Abel Edson and raised a large family there, bearing twins twice in little more than two years. She was most likely the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Bathsheba Edson (1742–1836).

Birth and family

Margaret was born at Bridgewater, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, on 3 January 1722, the daughter of Nathanael Conant and his wife Elisabeth Hains, who had married there on 17 December 1716. She grew up with a brother Jeremiah, two years older, and a younger brother John and sister Elisabeth, born in 1725 and 1727. Three half-siblings, Thomas, Nathan and Bithia, were children of her father’s earlier marriage to a wife named Margret. A Conant family genealogy published in 1887 gives her father’s death as 8 September 1745 and her mother’s as 27 February 1757.

Marriage and children

Margaret married Abel Edson, a Bridgewater man four years her elder, the son of Samuel Edson and his wife Mary. Mitchell’s history of Bridgewater (1840), followed by the Conant genealogy, puts the marriage in 1739; no entry for it has been found in the printed vital records.

Those records name eight children of Abel and “Margrett”, born between 1744 and 1765: Rachel, Abel, Bethia, Levi, Dan, Elisabeth, Keziah and Rufus. Bethia and Levi were born together on 2 March 1754, and Dan and Elisabeth followed on 11 and 12 April 1756. Rufus, the last, was born on 30 November 1765.

An unnamed child of Abel and Margaret died at Bridgewater on 10 August 1742, two years before the first of the recorded births.

Bathsheba, who married John Carver at Bridgewater in 1762, is not among them. She was Abel’s daughter: in a deed recorded in 1784 he gave land to “my beloved Daughter Bathsheba the wife of John Carver”. Her birth has not been found, and a published family history puts it in 1742, before Rachel’s. Margaret is the only wife recorded for Abel in these years, so she was probably Bathsheba’s mother, but no record says so.

No record of Margaret’s death has been found.

Notes

• The printed Bridgewater birth records give Margaret’s birth as 3 January 1722. The Conant genealogy gives 3 June 1722; for every other child of Nathanael and Elisabeth its dates agree with those records, and this page follows them.
• Her father’s will of 17 March 1742/3, recorded in the Plymouth County probate books, names “my daughter Margret Edson the wife of Abel Edson”, which settles that Abel’s wife was this Margaret. Mitchell’s history and the Conant genealogy, which takes its list of her children from Mitchell, both leave out Bethia and Bathsheba.
• The death of the unnamed child on 10 August 1742 is in the printed Bridgewater vital records, which take it from a family death record kept later by Oliver Alden. The record does not give the child’s name.