♀Sarah Gilman

Sarah Gilman (baptized 19 January 1622/23 – 26 May 1700) was a daughter of Edward Gilman, a yeoman of Hingham, in Norfolk, England, and the wife and executrix of John Leavitt of Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Moses Leavitt.

Early life

She was baptized at Hingham, in Norfolk, on 19 January 1622/23, a daughter of Edward Gilman and Mary Clarke. In 1638 her parents took the family to New England with the company of Hingham people who followed their parson, Robert Peck, and she was most likely one of the two daughters who sailed with them. The family settled at Hingham, Massachusetts.

Marriage and children

According to the History of the Town of Hingham, published in 1893 from the town records, and to a history of Maine families published in 1909, John Leavitt’s first wife, whose name neither gives, died on 4 July 1646, and on 16 December 1646 he married Sarah. By the 1893 account she was the mother of eight of his nine children named in the will: Israel, Moses, Josiah, Nehemiah, Sarah, Mary, Hannah and Abiel, dated from 1648 to 1667, with the married names of the four daughters matching those in the will. The ninth, Samuel, was a child of the first marriage, as was Elizabeth, who is not named in the will. The 1909 history makes the same division, but writes the youngest daughter Abigail where the will and the 1893 history have Abiel. Savage’s genealogical dictionary had given all the children to Sarah, though with some doubt. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (1928–1939) likewise names her as the mother of Moses, whom it places at Exeter, in the Province of New Hampshire.

Executrix

John Leavitt made his will at Hingham on 30 November 1689, and on 27 January 1691/2^W “Sarah Leavitt the Executrix” presented it for probate at Boston. The will names nine children, among them a son Moses, and two grandchildren. The 1893 history and Savage give John’s death as 20 November 1691, so she took the will to probate a little over two months after he died.

Death

She died at Hingham on 26 May 1700, and the town record enters her as “Sarah Leavitt widow relict of John Leavitt”. Savage, the 1893 history and the 1909 history give the same date.

Notes

Her parentage

The 1893 history gives her only as “Sarah”; later compilers, among them a Fish family history published in 1948, call her Sarah Gilman. The records of her father’s estate settle it. John Leavitt was among the sons-in-law who consented to the administration of Edward Gilman’s estate in 1655, and in the inventory sworn that October her mother lists money “in my son John Levits hands at Hingham”. The Hingham register has only one daughter Sarah of Edward Gilman, baptized on 19 January 1622/23 (the register’s Old Style year is 1622), who was about twenty-three at the marriage of December 1646. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire dates that baptism 1632/3, a misprint.

The crossing of 1638

The household that landed in 1638 is given as three sons, two daughters and three servants; that the daughters were Sarah and Lydia is the reading of the Folsom family histories.