♀Mary Mosher

Mary Mosher (died in or after 1769) was the wife of Philip Allen (1684–1752) of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and in her widowhood held a farm of 95 acres in the Oblong^W in Dutchess County, New York. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Elisha Allen (1722–1804).

Marriage and family

The Dartmouth town register, in a clerk’s copy, records the birth of her son Elisha on 7 September 1722 as the son of “Phillip and Mary”, and gives her no surname. A history of the settlers of the Beekman Patent, published in 1993, states that Philip Allen married her at Dartmouth and that she came with him to Beekman in Dutchess County at about the time her brother Nicholas Mosher did. Philip died in December 1752. The same history places his widow Mary on a farm of 95 acres in lot 31 of the Oblong in January 1761, and records her as still alive in 1769 in the accounts of the Merritt store. The family record gives 1769 as the year of her death, but that is the last year the store accounts show her living; no record of her death has been found.

Notes

No record of her parents has been found. The 1993 history makes her a daughter of Nicholas and Elizabeth (Audley) Mosher, born 16 December 1695, and the family record carries the same date, with Tiverton as the place. An 1891 genealogy of the Mosher family, however, lists the ten children of Nicholas Mosher without any Mary among them, and gives 16 December 1695 as the birth of a daughter Mercy who died in childhood, before a second Mercy was born in July 1705. The date may therefore have been borrowed from that child, even if the parentage is right. The 1891 list does include a son Nicholas, born 1 January 1702, so the brother who settled near her in Dutchess County agrees with the 1993 account in a way that does not depend on the disputed date.