♀Sarah Lane

Sarah Lane (born March 1637/8) was a woman of Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who married James Lewis of Barnstable, in Plymouth Colony^W, in 1655 and raised ten children with him there. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Sarah Lewis (1661–1732).

Early life

Sarah was the eldest child of George Lane of Hingham and his wife Sarah, and is said to have been baptized there in March 1637/8. Her father, by the same account a shoemaker and twice a selectman of the town, died in 1689, and her mother in 1695.

Marriage and family

In October 1655 James Lewis and Sarah Lane were married at Barnstable. She was about seventeen; James, born in England, had probably lived at Barnstable since about 1640. The Barnstable register records their first son, John, as “borne att the latter end of October, 1656”, and Samuel on 10 April 1659. Ten children in all, six sons and four daughters, were born to them over twenty years, the youngest, Joseph, in 1676.

Several of the children’s lives turned back toward Hingham. John was baptized there on 20 September 1657 and, according to the town’s history, settled there in 1675 as a blacksmith, while his sisters Sarah, Susanna and Mary all married Hingham men.

James died at Barnstable on 4 October 1713, aged 82, having left four pounds to each of their four daughters in a will made that May. When Sarah died is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Sarah Lewis. 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 James Lewis and Sarah Lane. 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

Birth and parents

Her baptism at Hingham in “March, 1637-38”, her place as the first of her parents’ children, and her father’s trade and his terms as selectman in 1669 and 1678 are from the Lane entry in the History of the Town of Hingham (1893), volume 2, page 411, which also records her marriage in 1655 to “Lieut. James Lewis of Barnstable”. The birth month given above is the month of that baptism. The History dates her father’s death 11 June 1689; the Hobart journal, as cited by Gale Ion Harris in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 156 (2002), pp. 145–49, gives 4 June. That article names her mother as Sarah Harris, from the will of Sarah’s grandmother Mary Harris of New London (19 January 1655/6), which names “my eldest daughter Sarah Lane” and Sarah Lane’s daughters Mary and Sarah.

Sources

The marriage is in the Barnstable entries printed in the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, volume 8, page 46: “James Lewis and Sarah Lane marryed October, 1655”, followed by the births of John and Samuel. Otis’s Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families (1888 to 1890), Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England and the 2002 Register article give the day as 31 October 1655. James’s will of 8 May 1713 is in the Barnstable County probate records; it names the four daughters as Sarah Waterman, Susanah Beals, Mary Linkhorn and Hannah Lumbert. His death on 4 October 1713, aged 82, is from Otis. John’s baptism at Hingham and his settling there are from the Hingham history, volume 2, page 441.