♀Sarah Williams

Sarah Williams (living in 1723) was the wife of Benjamin Dean, a landholder of Taunton, Massachusetts, whom she married in 1680 and who remembered her in his will forty-three years later. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Dean (1687–1770).

Her father was Samuel Williams of Taunton, and her mother was most likely Mary Gilbert, his first wife. Benjamin Dean and Sarah Williams were married at Taunton on 6 January 1680. Twelve children were born to Benjamin there over the next twenty-seven years, from Naomy in 1681 to Josiah in 1707, and Sarah was most likely the mother of them all. Their daughter Mary, born in 1687, became the wife of Samuel Edson of Bridgewater. When Benjamin made his will on 2 February 1722/3, he left land to his sons, disposed of a sawmill on Three Mile River, and named her “my beloved wife Sarah Dean”. He died at Taunton before the will was proved on 14 April 1725.

Notes

Her parents

Samuel Williams’s will, proved on 6 August 1697 and copied into the Bristol County probate register, vol. 1, leaves land to his sons and to “my three Daughters Sarah Dean Mary Andros & Hannah Bun” he gives “Eight pounds apeice”. Sarah was by then Benjamin Dean’s wife, so the will’s “Sarah Dean” is taken to be her. The will does not name his first wife.

Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700 and Mayflower Families Through Five Generations give that first wife as Mary Gilbert, a daughter of Thomas Gilbert, married at Taunton about 1662, and make her the mother of his three daughters. Savage gives the name Jane, which Torrey marks as wrong. The identification comes from those two works, not from a record that names her.

Her children

The Taunton birth entries of the twelve children name only their father. Sarah is taken as their mother because she married Benjamin in January 1680, the births follow without a break from 1681 to 1707, and his will of 1723 names his wife as Sarah. Compiled genealogies, among them J. B. Edson’s Edsons in England and America (1903) and the Mayflower Society’s Mayflower Families Through Five Generations, give the children as those of Benjamin and Sarah (Williams) Dean.

Marriage date

The printed Taunton vital records and the records of Plymouth Colony^W both give the marriage as 6 January 1680. Under the Old Style calendar^W the year then began on 25 March, so the same day is 6 January 1681 by modern reckoning.