♀Mary Hildreth

Mary Hildreth (fl. 1667–1690) was the wife of Jacob Warren of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, whom she married on 21 June 1667, and the mother of his children born there over the next two decades. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Abigail Warren (1683–1768).

Marriage and children

Mary Hildreth married Jacob Warren at Chelmsford on 21 June 1667; the town’s record writes her name “Mary Hilldereth”. The Chelmsford records enter the births of their children Joseph in 1670, Jacob in 1674, Elisabeth in 1675 and Ephraim in 1680, and of a daughter Sarah in 1690, whose entry writes her mother’s name as “Marah”. That is the last record of Mary. By July 1691 Jacob had a son by a second wife, Sarah, so Mary most likely died in 1690; no death for her is entered in the printed Chelmsford records.

Notes

The printed Chelmsford records date Elisabeth’s birth 3 March 1674 and Sarah’s 3 March 1689. Both dates fall before the 25 March start of the year then in use^W, so they are 1675 and 1690 by the modern count; read as printed, Elisabeth’s birth would fall less than a month after her brother Jacob’s baptism on 8 February 1673/4. Ephraim’s entry names only his father.

A 1915 publication of the Hildreth Family Association gives the marriage, says that Mary had five children by Jacob, and puts her death in 1689–90 with a question mark; it does not name Abigail.

Her daughter Abigail

Between Ephraim and Sarah came Abigail, born on 23 January 1682/3. The town clerk’s copy enters her as the daughter of “Jacob and Abigaill warren”, and the entry was struck through and left out of the printed Chelmsford records. No other record names a Jacob and Abigail Warren, and the only other Warren of the town with a wife named Abigail, Arthur Warren, was dead by 1671, when his estate came into probate. Since Mary was Jacob’s wife both before and after Abigail’s birth, Abigail is taken to be her daughter, and the clerk’s “Abigaill” most likely a slip for Mary.