♂Samuel Packard

Samuel Packard (16 September 1707 – 21 September 1774) was a landholder of Bridgewater^W in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who spent his whole life in the town where he was born, and whose wife, Susanna Kingsley, was a descendant of Francis Cooke^W of the Mayflower. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Susanna Packard (born 1736).

Early life and marriage

He was born at Bridgewater on 16 September 1707. A Mayflower genealogy names his parents as Samuel and Elizabeth (Lathrop) Packard.

On 22 July 1729, at Bridgewater, he married Susanna Kingsley (about 1702–1775), a daughter of Samuel Kingsley of Taunton North Purchase, the district that later became the town of Easton^W. She was about five years older than he was. No record of her birth has been found; the division of her father’s estate in 1722 names her among his children. Through her mother, Mary Washburn, she was a great-great-granddaughter of Francis Cooke, although the Mayflower genealogy that traces the line calls one link in it, the parentage of her grandmother Elizabeth Mitchell, circumstantial.

Family

A Mayflower genealogy lists seven children of the couple, born at Bridgewater between 1730 and 1740. The first two died as infants: a child born in July 1730 who died that September, and a son Samuel, born in September 1731, who died the following March. A second son was given the same name when he was born in December 1734, a common practice when a child died young. Their daughter Susanna was born on 24 August 1736, and in 1760 she married Joseph Knapp of Norton at Bridgewater.

Later life and death

In a deed dated 22 March 1769 and acknowledged on 21 May 1770, “Samuel Packard 2d of Bridgewater, gentleman”, and his wife Susanna sold two pieces of land in Bridgewater to George Haward. The “2d” was the usual way of telling apart two men of the same name in one town, and did not necessarily mean he was the son of the other.

He died at Bridgewater on 21 September 1774, without a will. On 6 February 1775 Adams Bailey of Bridgewater, a yeoman, was appointed administrator of the estate, which was declared insolvent in a petition of the same date; the letters call Samuel Packard a yeoman, not a gentleman as the deed had. No widow was named in the administration, and the Mayflower genealogy places Susanna’s death between May 1770 and February 1775, probably at Bridgewater.

Notes

The family tree does not yet record his parents. His daughter Susanna is identified with the Susanna Packard who married Joseph Knapp by her exact date and town of birth; the Mayflower genealogy ends its account of the family before her marriage.