♀Sybil Howard

Sybil Howard (26 September 1784 – 1 February 1864) was a New Hampshire-born farm wife of Franklin County, Maine, the wife of John Clough (1787–1855) and the mother of eight children raised at Freeman and Phillips. She was buried not beside her husband, who had died on a visit to Wisconsin, but on her father’s lot at Phillips. She was the third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Harriet Clough (1809–1887).

Early life

Sybil was the daughter of Uriah Howard (1763–1845) and his wife Lydia Royce (1767–1851), and shared her name with her mother’s mother, Seble Royce. The town’s record of births, as indexed, gives her birth as 26 September 1784 and names both parents, with a brother, Roswell, born in 1786. Her father had served as a private in a Massachusetts regiment of the Continental Army in 1778 and 1779, credited to the town of Douglas. The census of 1850 and her daughter Harriet’s census entry of 1880 both give Sybil’s birthplace as New Hampshire; the town is not recorded. The family appears to have been at Lyme, New Hampshire, from 1783, so she was probably born there.

In February 1846, living at Phillips, Sybil swore that she was the daughter of Uriah Howard and his wife Lydia, and that she was born on 26 September 1784. She sent a leaf from a family Bible, written by her father, that gives the birth dates of his thirteen children. Her own Bible, which her father had given her when she married, had been destroyed when her husband’s house burned.

Marriage and family

She married John Clough on 9 April 1809, according to the family Bible leaf her father wrote; no place is recorded. Their eldest child, Harriet, was born in 1809. The couple farmed at Freeman from at least 1820, and she appears in their household there at each census through 1840. In 1850 she and John were living at Phillips, where she was recorded as 65. Maine death records of her children’s later years name John Clough and Sybil Howard as their parents, and one of them spells her name “Sebel Howard”; a Clough family genealogy published in 1952 adds three more children. Her granddaughter Sybil, Harriet’s eldest child by Benjamin Webster (1802–1884), carried her name.

Death

John Clough died in 1855 at Portage, Wisconsin, where a family genealogy says he had gone to visit his brother. Sybil stayed in Maine. She died at Phillips on 1 February 1864, aged 79, and was buried in Riverside Cemetery there, on the lot of her father, Uriah Howard, beside her mother Lydia.

Notes

A family chart compiled in 1994 gives her birthplace as Phillips, Maine, the place where the town record of her birth was kept; Phillips was not settled until about 1790, and the censuses give New Hampshire. A lineage application of 1942 gives her mother’s maiden name as Rice; the New Hampshire birth record has Lydia Royce, born at Hanover in 1767. The same compilations give her death as 1863; the cemetery record gives 1 February 1864. Her father’s 1832 declaration places his home at Lyme, New Hampshire, during the Revolution, and his brother Joseph’s testimony of 1846 has Uriah and Lydia living at Joseph’s house there from 1783; the birthplace is therefore inferred, not recorded. A history of Maine place names gives Buckfield and about 1805 for her father’s move to Phillips; his own 1832 declaration gives Winthrop, Maine, in 1797 and Phillips two years later.