♂Obadiah Smith

Obadiah Smith (born 26 March 1731) was a native of Exeter, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, and the father of Anna Smith, the first wife of Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844). He was the fifth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Anna Smith.

The Exeter town records, as printed in a history of the town published in 1888, give his birth on 26 March 1731 as a son of Jonathan Smith and his second wife, Bridget Keniston, who had married on 11 August 1719. Jonathan’s first wife, Mary Ames, had died on 21 December 1717; the same records list two children of that first marriage and thirteen of the second, from Abraham in 1720 to Nathan in 1741, Obadiah being the eighth of the thirteen. He married Mary Leavitt on 5 February 1756; the date of his death is not known. He is said to have been a farmer. 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 makes Obadiah “a son of Jonathan Smith, of Exeter”, in agreement with the town records. 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

Occupation

The source is Dean Dudley, Supplement to the History and Genealogy of the Dudley Family (1898), page 75, chart key number 6. The same entry gives his birth as 26 March 1731 at Exeter, which agrees with the Exeter town records. The Supplement is a compiled family history, not a town record, so the occupation is stated in the body with that qualifier.