♀Susannah Furber

Susannah Furber (5 May 1664 – 1732) was the wife of John Bickford of Newington, in the Province of New Hampshire^W, and after his death in 1715 the administrator of his estate and the guardian of their younger children. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Bickford (born 1693). When her father died without a will and her brother kept his estate, her husband and her sisters’ husbands petitioned the judge of probate in 1699 to make him give each sister her portion.

Early life and marriage

Susannah was a daughter of William Furber of Welch Cove, in Dover, and most likely of his wife Elizabeth Clark. John Bickford married Susannah Furber by 1685. Between 1685 and 1709 they had ten children, whose births were entered in the Dover town records: Bridget, Jethro, John, Mary, Joseph, Anna, Pierce, the twins Lemuel and Eliakim, and Dodovah.

Her father’s estate

Her father died without a will, leaving, in the petitioners’ words, a considerable estate, and her brother William kept it in his own hands. On 30 December 1699 the husbands of the Furber sisters, John Dam, John Bickford and Thomas Bickford, petitioned the judge of probate on the sisters’ behalf: their brother-in-law, they wrote, “keeps the sam Contrary to Law from his sisters & will not Render there porshons”. They asked that he be made to deliver to each sister her portion. The records do not say how the matter ended.

Widowhood

John Bickford died in 1715 without a will. On 5 September 1715 Susannah, a widow of Newington, gave bond with her son Jethro to administer his estate, which an inventory taken in November valued at £651 17s. When his 150 acres were divided in 1719, she kept a third for her lifetime, her widow’s dower^W, and the other two thirds went to their nine children, with a double share to Jethro, the eldest surviving son. She was guardian of the children still under age.

In September 1732 most of her other children, Mary among them, complained to the judge of probate that Jethro had had sixty-five acres of their father’s land laid out to himself, twenty-five more than his right. Her own will, made on 8 November 1731, named only one child, her daughter Anna Walker. She died before 13 November 1732, when it was proved.

Notes

Sources

The petition of 1699, the papers of her husband’s estate and the complaint of 1732 are in the published probate records of New Hampshire. The petition names her father and calls the petitioners “the husbands of sd furbur sisters”, but it does not name the sisters. That Susanna Bickford, the widow of 1715 and the mother named in the Dover births, was born a Furber, and the date of her birth, 5 May 1664, come from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Noyes, Libby and Davis, which also names her mother as Elizabeth Clark. The record of her will, dated 8 November 1731 and proved 13 November 1732, is printed in the New Hampshire State Papers.