♀Mary Doggett

Mary Doggett (christened 21 September 1600) was a woman of Horsmonden, in Kent, who married the clothier George Lewis (died about 1663) and raised their children in Kent and then in Plymouth Colony^W, at Scituate and Barnstable. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son James Lewis (1631–1713).

Marriage in Kent

Mary is said to have been christened at Horsmonden on 21 September 1600, a daughter of Thomas Doggett and his wife Isabell. George Lewis and Mary Doggett are said to have married at Horsmonden, in Kent, on 1 November 1624, and their first four children, Mary, George, Thomas and James, were christened at Brenchley, his home parish, between 1625 and 1631. A son Edward was probably also born in England.

New England

George was in New England by 1634, and the family was at Scituate when Mary’s son John was born there in March 1637/8. In 1639 they followed the Reverend John Lothrop^W and his church to Barnstable. Two more children were born at Barnstable, Ephraim on 23 July 1641 and Sarah on 2 February 1643/4, the last when Mary was forty-three. A deed George made in 1654 is signed by Mary, his wife, and she is said to have been still living in 1670.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son James and James’s daughter Sarah Lewis (1661–1732). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from George Lewis and Mary Doggett. From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one, through George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Notes

Mary Doggett, not Sarah Jenkins

Amos Otis’s Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families (1888 to 1890) gives George Lewis’s wife as Sarah Jenkins, a sister of Edward Jenkins of Scituate, and took the Mary who signed the 1654 deed for a second wife, “living in 1670”, though he doubted the deed justified calling her one. In 1997 Gordon Lewis Remington showed, in two articles in The American Genealogist (volume 72, pages 311 to 328, with corrections in volume 74), that George came from Brenchley, and that his wife “was not Sarah Jenkins, as many sources had claimed, but was Mary Doggett, daughter of Thomas Doggett of Horsmonden, Kent.” With no second wife, the Mary of the 1654 deed was most likely Mary Doggett herself.

Sources

Her christening at Horsmonden, to a father written Thomas Doggete, the marriage there, written George Leweis and Mary Doggat, and the four Brenchley christenings are from an index of the English parish registers. The births of John, Ephraim and Sarah are in the Barnstable entries printed in the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, volume 8, under “Gorge Lewis, Seni’”, which give John as “borne att Scittuate, the 2 of March, 1637”; Otis gives the year as 1637/8. The move to Barnstable in 1639, the 1654 deed and her being alive in 1670 are from Otis. Edward’s likely English birth is Otis’s suggestion.