♀Sarah Harris

Sarah Harris (died 27 March 1695) was a woman of Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who married the shoemaker George Lane, one of the town’s early settlers, and raised eight children with him there. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Sarah Lane (born 1638).

Sarah was probably the daughter of Walter and Mary Harris, of Honiton, in Devon. Her mother’s will, made at New London, Connecticut, on 19 January 1655/6, names “my eldest daughter Sarah Lane” and Sarah’s daughters Mary and Sarah. The Honiton parish register records a Sarah baptized there on 13 March 1624/5, and her birth was probably well before that baptism.

George held a house lot at Hingham from the town’s first distribution of land in 1635, and it was there that the family grew. George and Sarah had eight children, five daughters and three sons, all born or baptized at Hingham between March 1637/8 and July 1656. The eldest, Sarah, married James Lewis of Barnstable in 1655. George died at Hingham on 4 June 1689. Sarah outlived him by nearly six years and died at Hingham on 27 March 1695.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Sarah Lane and her granddaughter Sarah Lewis (1661–1732). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from George Lane and his wife Sarah. On Joseph’s side the line runs from Sarah Lewis through her daughter Susannah Lincoln (born 1688), Elizabeth Colson (1723–1798), Sarah Hovey (1747–1805), Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849) and Noah Blanchard (1797–1875). From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one, through George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Notes

Her name

The Lane entry in the History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts (1893), volume 2, page 411, gives only her first name: “The chris. name of his w. was Sarah.” Gale Ion Harris, “Walter and Mary (Fry) Harris of New London, Connecticut”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 156 (2002): 145–49, calls her Sarah Harris and places her among the children of Walter and Mary Harris. The identification rests on the matches of name and date set out in the article, not on a record that names her as their daughter, so the parentage is treated here as probable.

Sources

Her death, “She d. in Hing. 26 March, 1694-95”, the land grant of 18 September 1635 and the children, “all b. or bt. in Hing.”, are all from the same page of the Hingham history, compiled from the town records.

Her death

The Hingham history gives her death as 26 March 1694/5, one day before the date used here. The date of 27 March 1695 is from the Hobart journal, printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 121 (1967): 282, as cited by Harris (2002). The same journal, at page 274, gives George’s death as 4 June 1689; the Hingham history gives 11 June. The dates here follow the journal.

Her children

Earlier counts gave nine children, including a son John, born 1647/8. Ellen Jeannette Lane, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 83 (1929): 466–67, as cited by Harris (2002), places that John in the family of William and Mary (Kelloway) Lane of Boston, not George’s, so the count here is eight: five daughters and three sons.