♀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; the original probate book has not been read. 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.

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 seven of their children, born between 1725 and 1740, as children “of Thomas and Mercy”. Their daughter Elizabeth was born there on 4 June 1736. A Fish family history adds two more children: a daughter, Sarah, born in 1738, and 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 neighbours 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.