♀Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon was the wife of Stephen Leavitt of Brentwood, New Hampshire, who named her in his will of 1755 as his “well Beloved Wife Mary Leavitt”, and the mother of Mary Leavitt, the wife of Obadiah Smith. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Leavitt.

Her husband’s will

No record of her birth or death has been found; she was living in April 1755. Stephen Leavitt made his will at Brentwood on 26 April 1755, and it was proved on 16 June 1755 among the Rockingham County probate records. It left her, for as long as she remained his widow, the use of land on the Little River, and for her life thirty acres and three quarters of an acre with the barn. She was also to have the kitchen, the buttery and a room of the dwelling house, half of the cellar, chamber, garret and orchard, two of the best feather beds, two thirds of the movables in the house, a yoke of oxen, three cows and other stock. Their daughter Mary was to share a privilege in the house “with her mother”, and their son Daniel was named sole executor.

Family

A Leavitt family history published in 1941 by Emily Leavitt Noyes gives her maiden name as Gordon and calls her a daughter of Alexander Gordon. According to that book, she married Stephen Leavitt at Kingston, New Hampshire, on 25 July 1725, the Reverend Ward Clark officiating; the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire gives the same day in 1726. The book also records that she and Stephen renewed their covenant in the Stratham church in 1745, together with their daughter Mary, and names two children: Mary, who married Obadiah Smith in 1756, and Daniel (1730–1783), who married Anna Gilman.

Lines of descent

Through her daughter Mary, she was the grandmother of Anna Smith, who married Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844).