♂William Ames

William Ames (died 1 January 1653/4) was an early settler of Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who died there five weeks before the birth of his youngest child, a daughter named Deliverance. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through Hannah Ames (born 1641), who was most likely his daughter.

Life

He was most likely the “Willm Ames the sonne of John Ames” who was baptized at Bruton, in Somerset, England, on 6 October 1605. By the 1640s he had made his home at Braintree. William Ames and his wife Hannah had six children: three daughters, Hannah, Rebecca and Lydia, probably born between 1641 and 1645, and then John in 1647, Sarah in 1650 and Deliverance, the youngest.

Death

William Ames died at Braintree on 1 January 1653/4, and Deliverance was born there on 6 February, five weeks later. His goods were valued at £45. On 6 March 1654/5, at Boston, administration of his estate was granted to his widow, Hannah, “for her selfe and Children”.

The family

Their son John moved to Bridgewater, in the Plymouth Colony^W, by 1672 and married Sarah Willis, according to a history of the town published in 1840. The same history records that William’s brother, John Ames, one of Bridgewater’s original proprietors, had no children and gave his large estate by deeds in 1697 to this nephew and to the nephew’s sons.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through Hannah Ames, who married John Hayden at Braintree in 1660, her daughter Hannah Hayden and Hannah Hayden’s son Hezekiah Thayer, whose son Noah Thayer (born 1745) was the father of Mary Thayer (1770–1827). Two of Mary’s grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other, so their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from William Ames through both parents.

Notes

His origin

An Ames genealogy printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1862 gives William’s birth at Bruton as 6 October 1605, and a history of Bridgewater published in 1840, drawing on an Ames family record, makes William and his brother John sons of Richard Ames of Bruton. The Bruton parish register has the baptism of “Willm Ames the sonne of John Ames” on 6 October 1605 and of “John Ames the sonne of John Ames” on 2 December 1610, so the register’s John, not Richard, is taken here as his father. The identification of the Braintree settler with the child baptized in 1605 rests on that exact date. The two men are tied together as brothers by John Ames’s deeds of 1697, which the 1840 history describes as made “to his nephew John, son of his brother William, of Braintree”. An index of the Bruton register also gives the marriage of John Ames and Christian Browne on 12 October 1601; she may have been William’s mother, but no record names her as such, and Bruton had more than one Ames family.

His children

The Braintree town records enter the births of John, Sarah and Deliverance, each as a child of William Ames and Hannah his wife, and William’s own death. The three elder daughters come from the 1840 history, which gives the family “according to Boston records”, and from the 1862 genealogy, which follows it; the same history makes the eldest, Hannah, the bride of John Hayden in 1660.