♀Ruth Sanford

Ruth Sanford was the second wife of James Akin (1706–1804), a landholder of Dartmouth, Massachusetts. James was the fifth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Ruth Akin (1731–1821), who was Ruth Sanford’s stepdaughter.

Marriage

An online family tree gives Ruth’s birth as 13 February 1729 at Portsmouth, Newport County, Rhode Island, but no record of it is cited, and her parents are not known. She was living at Dartmouth by 1748. On 26 October 1748, at Dartmouth, Bristol County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, James Akin and Ruth Sanford, both of that town, were married. He was forty-two; if the birth date is right, she was nineteen, about two years older than his daughter Ruth.

Children

Ruth was the mother of seven of James’s children. The Dartmouth register records seven children born to “James and Ruth” between 1749 and 1761, three of them sons; the last, Timothy, was born when James was fifty-five. The entries give only the mother’s first name, and James’s will of 1798 shows that these children were his. A different couple, Elihu and Ruth, appears on the same pages and is not the same family.

Her death, and the end of the marriage, are not recorded.

Notes

Not the daughter Ruth

Ruth Sanford has been confused with her stepdaughter Ruth Akin. The printed Dartmouth marriage volume brackets “Ruth Sanford” beside the marriage of Henry Sherman and Ruth Akin on 17 September 1749, but a Sherman family card file names the bride as Akin. That bride is James’s daughter by Amy Fish, not his second wife.

Her children

James’s will of 9 April 1798, proved 1 May 1804 (Bristol County Probate Records, register copy, pp. 396-397), names as his children Elisabeth, Richard, Hope, Hannah, Joseph and Timothy, all of them recorded at Dartmouth as children of “James and Ruth”. The seventh, Abigal, born in February 1750/1, is known from a Friends’ record. Because the will ties these children to James, the husband of Ruth Sanford was this James, and the marriage of 26 October 1748 was his.

A divorce

Compiled family trees and a FamilySearch profile record a divorce of James Akin, without a date, against Ruth Sanford. No record of a divorce is cited. Nor is there any record of a divorce from Amy Fish, who was living in July 1745 and was dead by March 1762.