♀Sarah Lewis

Sarah Lewis (4 March 1660/1 – 30 January 1731/2) was a woman of Barnstable, in Plymouth Colony^W, who spent her married life at Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, as the wife first of the carpenter Thomas Lincoln (1652–1698) and then of the housewright Robert Waterman. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Susannah Lincoln (born 1688).

Early life and first marriage

Sarah was born at Barnstable on 4 March 1660/1. Her parents, James Lewis and Sarah Lane, had married there in October 1655. Her father’s will of 8 May 1713, written when he was “being verry Ancient”, names four daughters, one of them Sarah Waterman, the name she bore after her second marriage.

Thomas Lincoln and Sarah Lewis are said to have married on 6 January 1684/5. Their five children were born at Hingham between 1685 and 1696: Sarah, Susannah, Thomas, Ebenezer and Mary. The town recorded Susannah’s birth on 19 September 1688 as the daughter “of Thomas Lincolne and of Sarah his wife”. Thomas died on 28 September 1698, while on a visit to Plymouth, and left her a widow at thirty-seven.

Second marriage

Less than five months later, on 20 February 1698/9, she is said to have married Robert Waterman at Hingham. He was a housewright of Fort Hill Street and a widower whose first wife had died in 1696. She and Robert had three more children at Hingham: Lydia in 1700, Thomas in 1701/2 and Hannah in 1704, according to a compiled history of the town. Robert was most likely a brother of John Waterman (1642–1718), an ancestor of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Sarah died at Hingham on 30 January 1731/2, in her seventy-first year. Robert outlived her and died in 1741.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her daughter Susannah, her daughter Elizabeth Colson (1723–1798), Elizabeth’s daughter Sarah Hovey (1747–1805) and Sarah’s son Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849). 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 Thomas Lincoln and Sarah Lewis. From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one.

Notes

Sources

Her first name is on record in the Hingham town register, which gives the birth of her daughter Susannah on 19 September 1688 to Thomas Lincolne and Sarah his wife. Her surname, her birth at Barnstable and her death at Hingham, both marriages, the three Waterman children, and Robert’s first wife, residence and death come from the genealogical volume of the History of the Town of Hingham, Massachusetts (1893), in its Lincoln and Waterman entries. The marriage of James Lewis and Sarah Lane at Barnstable in October 1655 is in the Plymouth Colony records; her own birth is not among the Barnstable entries printed there. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England calls her a daughter of James Lewis of Barnstable and gives the same dates for her first marriage and for her remarriage. The Hingham town register records Thomas’s death at Plymouth as “Thomas Lincolne of Hingham husbandman dyed at Plimouth 28: 7m: 1698”; the seventh month, counted from March, is September.

Her parents

Her father’s will, dated 8 May 1713, is in the Barnstable probate records for 1686 to 1747. He describes himself as “being verry Ancient but of perfect mind and memory”, and names four daughters, Sarah Waterman, Susanah Beals, Mary Linkhorn and Hannah Lumbert, leaving each four pounds. The will spells the surname Lewes.

A compiled history of Barnstable families, Otis’s Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families (1888 to 1890), makes her father a son of George Lewis, whom it places at East Greenwich, Kent, and gives his death at Barnstable on 4 October 1713, aged 82; the Brenchley parish register records her father’s christening there on 25 March 1631 (the Great Migration volume gives 1632), and a 1997 study in The American Genealogist by Gordon Lewis Remington corrected Otis’s East Greenwich to Brenchley, naming his parents as George Lewis and Mary Doggett, daughter of Thomas Doggett of Horsmonden, Kent, not Sarah Jenkins, as older books had it. The History of the Town of Hingham (1893), volume 2, page 411, makes her mother Sarah Lane a daughter of George Lane of Hingham, and records the marriage of Sarah Lane to James Lewis of Barnstable in 1655.

Robert Waterman

The 1893 history makes Robert Waterman a son of Robert Waterman of Marshfield and Elizabeth Bourne, born at Marshfield in 1652. John Waterman’s father was most likely the same Robert of Marshfield, which is what makes the two men brothers.