♀Sarah Odding

Sarah Odding (living in 1681) was the wife of Philip Sherman, an early settler and town clerk of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and was still living there when he made his will in 1681. She was most likely the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son John Sherman (1644–1734).

Marriage

She was probably born at Braintree, Essex, before 3 December 1612, the day her father’s will was proved. John Osborne Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887) names her mother as Margaret, who later married John Porter. The Roxbury church’s record of its members, as Robert Charles Anderson prints it in The Great Migration Begins, says Philip Sherman came over “a single man” and afterwards married “Sarah Odding, the daughter o[f] the wife of John Porter by a former husband”. Anderson dates the marriage to about 1633 at Roxbury, in Massachusetts.

Roxbury to Portsmouth

The church record ties the couple’s move to her stepfather. Once John Porter “was so carried away with these opinions of familism & schism”, it says, Philip “followed them & removed with them to the Iland”, and he was “cast out of the church”. The island was Aquidneck, where followers of Anne Hutchinson^W and John Wheelwright who left Massachusetts after the Antinomian Controversy^W founded Portsmouth in 1638. There Philip became the town’s clerk and the colony’s recorder.

Her husband’s will

Philip made his will on 31 July 1681, and it is known from a transcript of the Portsmouth record. In it he provided for “Sarah my loving wife”. She was to keep “her dwelling in the first room at the west end” of the house, with ten good ewe sheep, and their son Samuel, the executor, was to give her “food and raiment and all necessaries whatsoever during her natural life and at her decease decently to bury her”. Their son Samson was to have his half of the farm only after her death. The will names seven sons, Eber, Peleg, Edmund, Samson, Samuel, John and Benjamin, and four daughters, Sarah, Mary, Hannah and Philip. When Sarah died is not known. Austin records only that she was living in 1681, and the records do not say whether she outlived Philip, whose will was proved on 22 March 1686/7.

Lines of descent

Her son John, to whom Philip left “my bay mare”, is most likely the John Sherman (1644–1734) who settled at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, and married Sarah Spooner. Austin and Anderson both identify him so, and the Dartmouth John’s own will of 1720 mentions “my brother Peleg Shearman deceased”, which fits Philip’s son Peleg. The Portsmouth will does not say where its son John lived, so the link is probable rather than proven.

Notes

A 1998 study by Patricia Law Hatcher in The American Genealogist, as summarized in Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter, finds that Sarah came to Roxbury in 1633 with her mother and stepfather and that her father was William Odding of Braintree, Essex. In that study, her father’s will of October 1612, proved 3 December 1612, names a daughter written Sarahe. Anderson’s summary is the only source cited for these findings. Older genealogies had made her a daughter of George and Margaret Odding. The Roxbury church record names her only as the daughter of John Porter’s wife by a former husband, so the link to William rests on Hatcher’s study and his will.