♀Susanna Packard

Susanna Packard (born 24 August 1736) was a woman of Bridgewater in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, a great-great-great-granddaughter of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke^W, who married Joseph Knapp of Norton in 1760. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Joseph Knapp (1763–1839).

Early life

She was born at Bridgewater on 24 August 1736, the fifth of the seven children of Samuel Packard (1707–1774) and Susanna Kingsley (1702–1775), who had married there in 1729. The town’s printed birth records enter her among the children of Samuel and Susannah Packard.

Two of the children, one born in July 1730 and a son Samuel born in September 1731, died as infants before she was born, and when another son was born in December 1734 he was given the name Samuel again. The other children were Charity, born in 1733, Jedediah, born in 1738, and Abijah, born in 1740.

Marriage and family

On 28 August 1760, at Bridgewater, she married Joseph Knapp (1740–1811). The town’s printed marriage record names him “Joseph of Norton”, a town across the line in Bristol County, and her “Susanna Packard”, noting that a church record of the same marriage spells her name Susannah. The couple’s son Joseph was born at Bridgewater on 9 June 1763; the town register enters him under the heading “The Birth of the Children of Joseph & Susanna Knap”. Her husband was later described as “of Easton”, the town where her mother’s family had lived.

A compiled chart of the Cooke descent lists four more children of the couple, born at Bridgewater between 1767 and 1775; they rest on that chart alone. Her son Joseph served as a private in the Revolution and by 1792 was living at Livermore, in the part later known as Leeds, in the District of Maine^W; her husband also came to Leeds and died there in 1811. The records found so far do not show whether she went with him, and no record of her death or burial has been found.

Notes

A Carver family history calls her “Sarah (Packard)”. Her son’s death record, the town’s record of her marriage and every other source call her Susanna or Susannah, and the name Sarah appears to be that book’s error.

The printed Bridgewater records give her birth, her parents’ marriage on 22 July 1729 and the births and early deaths of her brothers and sisters; Mitchell’s history is a compilation, and the elimination above is only as firm as his account of the other Susanna Packards.

Which Susanna Packard

Her birth is on record, and so is the marriage of a Susanna Packard to Joseph Knapp, but no record found so far joins the two. The certified copy of her son’s death record names his mother as “Susanna Packard, b. Bridgewater”, and a later lineage-society application gives her birth as 24 August 1736 and her parents as Samuel Packard and Susanna Kingsley; the application is a compiled source. The town records themselves do not say that the Susanna born in 1736 was Joseph Knapp’s bride.

Bridgewater had several Susanna Packards, and Nahum Mitchell’s history of the town, published in 1840, does not settle which was which. It lists the Susanna born in 1736 among Samuel Packard’s children, and in the same pages names a Susanna Packard who married Seth Rickard in 1757, one who married Joseph Knapp in 1760 and one who married Timothy Manly in 1761 (the town’s printed marriage record has 1 April 1762), without saying which of them was Samuel’s daughter.

The question can be narrowed by elimination. Four other Susanna Packards were born at Bridgewater between 1715 and 1745, and Mitchell gives each of them a husband and a marriage between 1734 and 1748. A fifth, born in 1739, died in April 1742, according to the town’s death record, and a sixth, born in 1749, was far too young to marry in 1760. Joseph Knapp’s bride was born at Bridgewater and was of an age to marry in 1760 and to bear children from 1763. The only Bridgewater-born Susanna Packard of that age who was still living and unmarried in 1760 is Samuel’s daughter. This is an inference, and it rests in part on Mitchell’s assignment of the earlier marriages, since the marriage records themselves name no parents. No record of the other two women Mitchell lists, Rickard’s and Manly’s brides, is known; they were presumably widows or women born elsewhere.

Descent from Francis Cooke

The standard Mayflower genealogy of the Cooke family lists, among the children of Samuel and Susanna (Kingsley) Packard, “Susanna, born 24 August 1736”, but its account ends with that birth and does not follow her into marriage.

Above her the line runs through her mother, her grandmother Mary Washburn and her great-grandmother Elizabeth Mitchell to Jane Cooke, a daughter of Francis Cooke. The same genealogy calls the proof that Elizabeth Mitchell was Jane Cooke’s daughter circumstantial.