♀Mercy Coggeshall

Mercy Coggeshall (22 December 1704 – 10 February 1778) was a Rhode Island-born colonist who moved with her husband’s family from Portsmouth to Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and then to the Oblong in Dutchess County, New York. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Elizabeth Fish (1736–1814).

Early life

Mercy was born at Portsmouth, on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island, into the Coggeshall family, one of the founding families of the colony. A family genealogy published in 1930 names her parents as John Coggeshall (1659–1727) and Mary Stanton (1668–1747) of Newport. It rests that parentage on her mother’s will, written on 4 March 1740 and proved on 1 June 1747, which leaves a bequest to “Mercy Fish, wife of Thomas Fish of Dartmouth, Mass.” The will is known only from that printed abstract. Her birth does not appear in the printed Portsmouth birth register. The only Coggeshall family “of John and Mary” in that register had a son, Giles, born on 3 December 1704, nineteen days before Mercy’s recorded birth. That family cannot be hers, and how she fits among the Portsmouth Coggeshalls is still open.

The same abstract names the rest of the household she came from. Her mother left bequests to her sons John, Joshua and Joseph of Jamestown, to her daughters Mary Weaver, Hannah Weaver and Mercy Fish, and to a son-in-law, Peleg Wood. Another brother turns up in the Quaker marriage records instead. Caleb Coggeshall, “of John and Mary,” married Mercy Mitchell of Newport on 18 May 1732, and the Friends’ record of Mercy’s own marriage in 1724 describes her in the same words, “of John and Mary, Newport.” He was most likely her brother. The abstract does not name him, and he was dead by September 1743, when his widow married again.

Marriage and family

On 16 December 1724, at Portsmouth, she married Thomas Fish (1703–1786), eldest son of Preserved Fish and Ruth Cook. The couple settled at Dartmouth, where the town register records eight of their children, born between 1725 and 1740, as children “of Thomas and Mercy”: Lidia, Wait, Amie, Preserved, John, Elizabeth, Sarah and Caleb. Elizabeth, the sixth, was born there on 4 June 1736, and Sarah followed on 28 December 1738. A Fish family history adds one more child, a son, Joshua, born in 1743 at the Oblong. That places the family in New York by the early 1740s.

The Oblong

The Oblong was a strip of land along the Connecticut border, in what became the town of Amenia, Dutchess County. A later genealogy of the Allen family records that Elizabeth’s husband, Elisha Allen, also from Dartmouth, farmed sixty acres on lot 31 of the Oblong. That would make father and son-in-law neighbors there. The 1930 Coggeshall genealogy records Mercy’s death in Dutchess County on 10 February 1778. Thomas outlived her and died at the Oblong about 1786, aged eighty-three.