♀Ruth Butterfield

Ruth Butterfield (18 February 1779 – 30 December 1854) was a native of New Hampshire who raised her family at Wilton, Maine, as the second wife of Joseph Goss Webster (1769–1831), and who outlived him by twenty-three years. She was the third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Benjamin Webster (1802–1884).

Family and birth

The town book of Wilton, Maine, has a page headed “The Record of Isaac and Ruth Butterfields Family”. It gives her birth at Temple, New Hampshire, on 18 February 1779, and names her parents as Isaac Butterfield (about 1750 – 12 October 1812) and his first wife, Ruth Spaulding, who died on 8 May 1790; the page gives her only as Ruth, and her surname comes from the Westford marriage register. Ruth was the third of at least seven children of that marriage: the page lists an older brother, Isaac, born at Dunstable in 1773, and Solomon, Abraham, Joseph, Daniel and Hitty, born at Temple between 1776 and 1787. Her mother died when she was eleven. Her father then married Ruth Fletcher in 1790, and the page lists five more children of that marriage, born from 1791 onward.

The Temple birthplace agrees with the later records made by her sons. The 1889 death registration of her son Abel at Lawrence, Massachusetts, gives his mother’s birthplace as Temple, and her son Benjamin’s entry in the census of 1880 gives it as New Hampshire.

Marriage and Wilton

She married Joseph Goss Webster at Farmington, Maine, on 27 November 1800. The couple, both of a place called Tyngstown (Wilton), had entered their intention to marry at Farmington on 3 November 1800, and the town clerk issued the certificate on 24 November. Joseph already had four children by his first wife, Betsey Walker, whom he had married in 1790. A memorial of the Webster family compiled in 1904 lists seven children of the second marriage, born between 1802 and 1818: Benjamin, Edee, Eunice, Abigail, Ruth, Cordelia and Abel. The Wilton town records give nine, born between 1802 and 1820, and add an Abigail, born in 1804 and dead at three in 1807, and Lovinda, born in 1820. The family lived at Wilton, where Benjamin and Abel were born and where, the memorial says, Joseph “lived and died”. He was buried in the family burying ground on the old homestead there.

Death

According to the memorial, Ruth died on 30 December 1854 and was buried in the old cemetery on State Street at Concord, New Hampshire. By 1850, aged 71, she was living at Concord with her daughter Eunice and Eunice’s husband, West Robinson, which accounts for her burial there.

Notes

The 24 November date in family trees is the day the Farmington town clerk issued the marriage certificate; the Farmington records and the 1904 memorial give the wedding as 27 November 1800.