♀Waite Allen

Waite Allen (8 June 1766 – 22 August 1850) was a New York farm wife who married her second cousin Batchelder Sherman, raised a large family, moved with them from Cambridge in Washington County to New Berlin in Chenango County, and was named executrix of her husband’s will. She was the third great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Salena Sherman (1806–1842).

Early life

Waite Allen was a daughter of Elisha Allen (1722–1804) and Elizabeth Fish (1736–1814), one of their twelve children; her eldest brother, John, had been born fourteen years before her, in 1752. Her birthplace is not recorded. Her parents had married at the Oblong, in Dutchess County, and later settled at Cambridge, in what became Washington County, New York, where her father died before June 1802. His will, proved in Washington County on 10 June 1802, names her among his daughters, each of whom was to receive twenty-five dollars and a cow.

Lines of descent

Her mother Elizabeth Fish and her husband’s mother Ruth Akin were first cousins, both granddaughters of Preserved Fish and Ruth Cook of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. When Waite married Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) at Cambridge, the two families joined for a second time, and the couple were second cousins.

Marriage and family

The date of the marriage is not recorded, but a Sherman family card file compiled in 1913 gives the first child’s birth as February 1783, and it lists sixteen children born between then and March 1811. Two of them were daughters named Alexia, born in 1787 and 1791, which suggests that the first had died before the second was born. The family stayed at Cambridge through the census of 1810 and had moved to New Berlin, in Chenango County, by 1818. The card file says that Batchelder built a sawmill there in 1815, on an outlet of Chenango Lake. A 1955 genealogy of the Gorham family, which draws partly on the family Bible of Reuben’s wife, Betsey Gorham, gives a different account: that their son Reuben (born on 17 November 1796, according to the card file) built a log house and sawmill near Chenango Lake in 1812, and that he married Betsey on 1 December 1822. Both statements rest on compilations, and the records do not settle which Sherman built the mill.

Ten of the children were living when Batchelder made his will “of New Berlin” on 2 January 1828. He left the rest of his personal estate to his wife for her lifetime, to be divided afterwards among their four daughters, Luna, Prudence, Salena and Wait, and he named her executrix together with their son Reuben. He died on 26 February 1828, and the will was proved that October.

Widowhood

Waite Sherman outlived her husband by twenty-two years, and she also outlived her daughter Salena, who died in 1842. She spent those years at New Berlin. The census of 1850, as its index reads (the page itself has not been examined), lists her there as “Wait Sherman”, aged 83 and born in New York, in a household with Prudence Sherman, aged 50, and Allen F. Sherman, aged 39. A Prudence and an Allen are both named as children in her husband’s will, and the card file gives a daughter Prudence born in 1800 and a son Allen born in 1811, which fits the ages; the census of that year did not record relationships, so it does not itself say that they were her children. She died at New Berlin later that year, on 22 August 1850, and was buried there. Her maiden name was carried on in the family: her great-grandson Orcus Allen Curtis, born in 1865, had it as his middle name.

Notes

Her birth date rests on a family pamphlet by Charles North on her brother John Allen and his wife Phebe Deuel, and on the 1913 card file, which gives the same date. If it is right, she was sixteen at the birth of her first child and nearly forty-five at the birth of her last. No baptism or other record of her birth has been found. Some later accounts give her birthplace as Chenango County, but that county was not formed until 1798.

North’s pamphlet said that she married an Oliver Sherman of Cambridge. A correction printed in a genealogical periodical stated that she married Batchelder Sherman, son of Henry and Ruth (Akin) Sherman, and that Oliver settled in the western part of the state. Her husband’s will, which names his wife and the same children, and the 1913 card file, which names her as his wife, both agree with the correction.

A reminiscence of the Sherman family written decades later calls her a cousin of Ethan Allen of Ticonderoga. No record has been found to test the claim.