♀Mary Leavitt

Mary Leavitt was the wife of Obadiah Smith (born 1731), a native of Exeter, New Hampshire, and the mother of Anna Smith, the first wife of Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844). She was the fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Anna Smith.

Parentage

She was probably born at Brentwood, New Hampshire, though no dated record of her birth is known, and no record of her death has been found. The will of her father, Stephen Leavitt of Brentwood, New Hampshire, dated 26 April 1755 and proved on 16 June 1755, names her as his “well Beloved Daughter Mary Leavit”, still unmarried, and leaves her two forty-acre lots of land laid out by the town of Exeter, a cow and two heifers for as long as she remained unmarried, and a privilege in the dwelling house with her mother. The rest of the land, the house and the farm went to her brother, “my Well Beloved Son Daniel Leavit”, whom the will made sole executor; it names no other child. She married Obadiah Smith at Brentwood in February 1756. A compiled Leavitt genealogy by Emily Leavitt Noyes (volume 1, 1941) says that she and Obadiah later sold the land her father had willed her.

A family history published in 1886 by Dean Dudley, a grandson of Anna, names Obadiah Smith and his wife Mary Leavitt as Anna’s parents, and calls Mary a daughter of Stephen Leavitt, “son of Moses, of Exeter, the surveyor”; in another passage it calls her father “Stephen of Brentwood”.

Lines of descent

According to the published family history and genealogical dictionary, Mary’s daughter Anna and Nathaniel Dudley were third cousins, because Mary was a great-granddaughter of Samuel Dudley (1608–1683) through his daughter Dorothy and Moses Leavitt of Exeter.

Family

The book quotes a letter of 14 March 1865 from Anna’s son John Gilman Dudley, who wrote that his mother “had but one sister” and recalled seeing her brother Jonathan. According to the family history, that sister, Sarah Smith, married at Raymond, New Hampshire, as his second wife, Joseph Dudley (born 1750), a nephew of Nathaniel Dudley’s father, Judge John Dudley, so that the two sisters married first cousins.

Notes

Birth

The source is Dean Dudley, Supplement to the History and Genealogy of the Dudley Family (1898), page 75, chart key number 7. The entry gives her birthplace as Brentwood, New Hampshire, with no date. No dated birth record is known, so the birthplace rests on this family history alone.