♀Susanna Kingsley

Susanna Kingsley (about 1702 – before 6 February 1775) was a woman of Bridgewater in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, a great-great-granddaughter of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke, who married Samuel Packard there in 1729 and raised a family of seven children. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Susanna Packard (born 1736).

Early life

She was born about 1702, probably at Taunton North Purchase, the settlement that later became the town of Easton^W, the daughter of Samuel Kingsley (1662–1713) and Mary Washburn (1662–1740). No record of her birth has been found; the year is an estimate. Her father died on 17 December 1713, when she was about eleven, and her mother lived on as a widow until 28 February 1740, when she died at Easton.

What is known of her girlhood comes from the settlement of her father’s estate. The division of his real estate, made on 5 October 1722, names the widow and all eight children, two sons and six daughters, and calls Susanna the fourth daughter. Her three elder sisters appear in it under their married names; she is still “Susanna Kingsley”, so she was unmarried at twenty or so. Her two younger sisters were still minors, and their elder brother Samuel had been made their guardian that spring.

Marriage and family

On 22 July 1729, at Bridgewater, she married Samuel Packard (1707–1774), who had been born there on 16 September 1707, a son of Samuel Packard and Elizabeth Lathrop. The couple lived at Bridgewater, where seven children were born between 1730 and 1740. The first two died as infants: a child born in July 1730 lived only two months, and a son Samuel, born in September 1731, died the following March. When another son was born in December 1734 he was given the same name, a common practice when a child had died.

The fifth child, a daughter Susanna, was born at Bridgewater on 24 August 1736. The Mayflower genealogy that records the family stops at her birth and does not follow her further. She is identified with the Susanna Packard who became the mother of Joseph Knapp (1763–1839) because the birth date and the town agree exactly; no record found so far states the connection outright.

Later life and death

The last record of Susanna is a deed of 22 March 1769, acknowledged on 21 May 1770, in which her husband, styled “Samuel Packard 2d of Bridgewater, gentleman”, and his wife Susanna sold two pieces of land in the town. The “2d” was the usual way of telling him apart from another man of the same name in Bridgewater. Her husband died at Bridgewater on 21 September 1774, without a will. When an administrator was appointed to his estate on 6 February 1775, the estate was declared insolvent, and no widow was named. That silence is why the Mayflower genealogy places her death between the deed of 1770 and that date. No record of her death or burial has been found.

Notes

Her descent from Francis Cooke runs through her mother, Mary Washburn, her grandmother Elizabeth Mitchell and her great-grandmother Jane Cooke. The standard Mayflower genealogy of the Cooke family calls the proof that Jane Cooke was Elizabeth Mitchell’s mother circumstantial.