♂William Wilson

William Wilson (1741 – 15 April 1826) was an inhabitant of Topsham, in what was then the District of Maine^W, who died there at the age of eighty-five. He was the fourth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Johnson Wilson.

Early life

William was born in 1741. The Wheelers’ history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, published in 1878, places his birth in Boston, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay; an early history of Topsham written by Moses Woodman, quoted in the town’s printed vital records, gives “abt. 1741 in Boston (?)” and says he “came to T. when abt. 1 y.” Both histories name his parents as Capt. Thomas Wilson, who had come from Ireland as a boy, and Ann Cochran of Londonderry, New Hampshire. Thomas died at Topsham on 7 April 1786 “in his 73d. y.”, and Ann on 4 October 1789, aged seventy-six.

The Wheelers list six brothers and sisters. Among them were James, who died at Topsham in 1802, and Thomas, of whom Woodman wrote that he “went to sea, was never heard from. (A Tory.)”, that is, a Loyalist^W in the Revolution.

Marriage and family

On 4 December 1769 William married Mary Patten, whom the Wheelers call “of Arundel”. A typed record of Topsham’s early families calls her the “daughter of Robert Patten of Kennebunk”; no record proving her parentage has been found. The same typed record credits William and Mary with eleven children, among them Robert, Actor, Lettice, Mary, Rachel and Johnson. The town’s printed vital records, drawing on Woodman’s history, name Johnson as the son of William and Mary (Patten) Wilson; in 1807 he married Hannah Stone, born Hannah Walker, and their daughter Eliza Stone Wilson was born at Topsham in 1812.

Death

William Wilson died at Topsham on 15 April 1826, aged eighty-five, as his gravestone records. Maine had become a state six years before.

Notes

• His age at death on the gravestone fits a birth in 1741. The same typed family record gives his death as 18 April 1826 “at eighty four”; the gravestone date is followed here.
• The parentage in the town’s printed vital records rests on Woodman’s manuscript history, and the Wheelers most likely drew on the same work, so the two are not independent witnesses. No record naming William’s parents has been found; the Boston births of 1741 and the Lincoln County probate records to 1800 contain none.
• The two histories disagree on when the family came to Topsham: Woodman has William there at about a year old, the Wheelers date the family’s settlement to 1752.
• The marriage date comes from an index of Maine marriages that places it at Lewiston, a town not incorporated until 1795; the place is the indexer’s, not the record’s.
• The sons’ names Robert and Actor match those of Robert Patten, who according to the Wheelers settled at Arundel in 1737, and his son Actor Patten, who moved to Topsham in 1760. This suggests, but does not prove, that Mary was Robert’s daughter.
• A genealogy of the Merryman family published in 1905 also names William Wilson and Mary Patten as the parents of Actor Wilson.