♀Sarah Clark

Sarah Clark (January 1651 – 26 March 1717) was the wife of Samuel Howlett, a deacon of the church at Topsfield, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and a daughter of Daniel Clark of the same town. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Howlett (born 1672).

Birth and parents

She was born at Topsfield, the daughter of Daniel Clark. The printed records of the Essex County quarterly courts give her birth as the “last of Jan., 1651”; as the year then began on 25 March, under the Old Style calendar^W, that was January 1652 by the modern reckoning. A Maine family history published in 1909 gives the day as 31 January 1651/52 and makes her the fourth of eleven children of Daniel and Mary Clark. The same work records that her father was licensed in 1669 to keep an ordinary at Topsfield for “selling beer and victuals”, and that he died before 25 March 1690, leaving a will that names grandchildren by the name of Howlett.

In October 1659 a girl named Sarah Clerk was presented at the Salem court for stealing a silk scarf from the house of John Putnam Jr.; she confessed and was fined. Sarah, then a child of eight, was most likely that girl.

Marriage and family

Samuel Howlett and Sarah Clark were married at Topsfield on 3 January 1670/71. Their daughter Mary was born there on 17 February 1671/72, and in 1689/90 she married Ephraim Wildes, whose mother, Sarah Wildes^W, was hanged at Salem as a witch in 1692. The town’s printed vital records enter seven children of the couple, born between 1672 and 1693. Sarah died at Topsfield on 26 March 1717. Her husband survived her and died on 11 March 1720.

Notes

Court presentment, 1659

The Essex County quarterly court records, edited by George Francis Dow, enter a presentment of “Sarah Clerk” at Salem for the theft of a silk scarf from the house of John Putnam Jr., and a summons of 28 October 1659 to “Sara Clarke”; the accused confessed and was fined. The entries are on record. Walter Goodwin Davis, in his ancestry of Dudley Wildes (1959), judged it probably this Sarah, then aged eight. His reasoning: the Topsfield constable served the summons, and Daniel Clarke, her father, is named on it. The identification is Davis’s.

Death, 1717

The town’s printed vital records enter her death as “Sarah, w. Samuel, Mar. 26, 1717”, without her maiden name. She is taken to be this Sarah because Deacon Samuel Howlett’s will of 1714/15 names a living wife, and no other Samuel of Topsfield then had a wife Sarah.