♀Ruth Conner

Ruth Conner (16 May 1670 – 5 August 1727) was the wife of Thomas Clough, a yeoman of Salisbury, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, and the mother of eleven children recorded in the town between 1688 and 1711. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Zacheus Clough (died by 1757).

Family

Ruth was the daughter of Cornelius and Sarah Conner, born at Salisbury on 16 May 1670. Thomas Clough and Ruth Conner were married at Salisbury in 1688 or 1689. She was most likely his second wife; his first, Hannah Gile, had died in the winter of 1683–84. Eleven children of Thomas and Ruth were recorded at Salisbury between June 1688 and September 1711, among them Zacheus, born on 17 February 1691/92. Ruth died at Salisbury on 5 August 1727, entered in the town’s records as the wife of Thomas Clough senior.

The petition for Mary Bradbury

In July 1692, at the height of the Salem witch trials, Thomas and Ruth were most likely the “Tho: Clough & his wyfe” who put their names to a petition in support of their Salisbury neighbour Mary Bradbury^W, then accused of witchcraft. Dated 22 July, it declared that her life had been “such as became ye gospel”, and that none of her neighbors, some of whom had lived in the town with her for more than fifty years, had ever known her to fall out with anyone. “Sarah Connor widow”, probably Ruth’s own mother, signed it too. The petition did not save Mary Bradbury from being condemned that September, though she escaped.

Notes

Dates

Dates between January and March before 1752 are written with both years, as the records have them (Old Style and New Style dates^W); Zacheus’s birth on 17 February 1691/92 fell in 1692 by the modern reckoning.

Parentage

Salisbury’s records of births include a Ruth, daughter of Cornelius and Sarah Conner, born on 16 May 1670. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England lists her among Cornelius Conner’s children and says that she married Thomas Clough in 1687 as his second wife; a 2009 edition of the records of the Salem witch-hunt, in its notes on the people named, also makes Ruth Clough a daughter of Cornelius and Sarah Conner, and a family chart compiled in 1994 gives her the same birth day. The birth entry is the record that names her parents; no record names them at her marriage or death, and the compiled sources above agree with it.

The marriage

The Salisbury entry for the marriage of Thomas and Ruth Conner has no day, and the printed records date it to 1688 or 1689. Savage, an abstract of the Salisbury records printed in 1854 and the 2009 edition all give 1687, and the first child of Thomas and Ruth, Jeremiah, was born on 21 June 1688, which fits the earlier year better. Thomas Clough’s earlier marriage, to Hanna Gile in March 1679/80, and her death in the winter of 1683–84 are in the Salisbury records; that this was the same Thomas who married Ruth rests on Savage and the 1854 abstract.

The petition

The petition of 22 July 1692 is printed among the records of the Salem witch-hunt. The editors identify its “Tho: Clough & his wyfe” as Thomas Clough of Salisbury, born 1651, who married Ruth Connor, and “Sarah Connor widow” as the widow of Cornelius Conner and mother of Ruth Clough. The only other Thomas Clough of Salisbury at the time, Thomas’s son born in 1681, was ten years old.