♀Mary (surname unknown)

Mary (living in 1691) was the wife of Richard Pratt (1615–1691), a settler of Malden, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and in 1691 she was named in his will as one of his two executors. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, all through Hannah Pratt, most likely her daughter.

Marriage and family

Her maiden name and her family are not known. She married Richard Pratt, and the couple most likely had all seven of his known children, born from 1643 on: Mary, Thomas, Mercy, John, Elizabeth, Martha and Hannah. Mercy, born on 15 June 1650, is not named in her father’s will and probably died young. Of the daughters, Mary married Thomas Skinner, Elizabeth married Gershom Hawkes and Martha married John Pratt, while Hannah married Joseph Hovey and made her home at Hadley, on the Connecticut River.

The will of 1691

In May 1691 Richard made his will. He left Mary his dwelling house, gave their son Thomas all his housing and lands in Malden, and named his “Dearly beloved wife Mary” and Thomas his executors. Among the smaller legacies were forty shillings for their grandson James Hovey “towards his bringing up”. Hannah is not among “my three Daughters now living”, so she had most likely died, leaving her son James still a child. Richard died at Malden, and the will was proved on 6 October 1691. When Mary died is not known.

Lines of descent

All three of Nancy Jane Blanchard’s lines to Mary run through Hannah Pratt and her husband Joseph Hovey. Two pass through their son Ebenezer Hovey (born 1680) and meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Richard and Mary. The third comes down through their son John Hovey (1684–1714) to Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942). She and Wesley’s son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) were the parents of Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy Jane Blanchard’s father, in whom all three lines meet.

Notes

Her name

Her husband’s will, in the Middlesex County probate records, calls her “my Dearly beloved wife Mary”. It gives no surname, and neither does Thomas Bellows Wyman’s The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown (1879) or the Malden town records.

Hannah’s mother

The will names Hannah as Richard’s daughter, through the legacy to “my Grand child James Hovey ye son of my Daughter Hannah”, but it does not say who Hannah’s mother was. Wyman gives Richard one wife, Mary, with children from 1643, and The Hovey Book (1913) calls Hannah a daughter of Richard and Mary Pratt of Malden. Mary is therefore Hannah’s mother by the best reading of the evidence, not by a record that says so.

The children

The seven children and their order come from Wyman and James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England. Mercy’s birth, as a daughter of Richard, is entered in the Malden town records under 15 June 1650; Savage notes that she died young. The will copy dates itself 6 May 1691; Wyman prints 8 May.