In progress (ending needs clean-up) ..
Scroll to ...Bottom (Grave List--Family, with links to eight known siblings)
Her great-grandfather, Ferdinando Thayer, had been the main builder of Mendon, east of Boston. Stories vary. He was famed, but also "a bit of a rake". Officially of Mendon in Sept. of 1663, he apparently led others there later. Paperwork kept back in Boston show he owned a 40-acre lot in Mendon by the 1670s. It was later divided between his sons. Of that large set, his son Isaac, born in Mendon to first wife Huldah, would be Keziah's grandfather. Another son, Jonathan, would marry Elizabeth French of Braintree and settle with her in Mendon. Holbrook in-laws of the Thayers and Frenches also hailed from Braintree.
Cementing his relationship with his own brothers, also preventing old family land from being taken in new court proceedings, Ferdinando conveyed his land in Braintree to his brothers. The brothers remained behind, good people, but not becoming wealthy like Ferdinando.
Cementing the brothers' relationships with the Frenches, Elizabeth French's elder brother, John French the junior, would marry Experience Thayer about 1685. They would also stay back in Braintree, unaffected by native attacks in Mendon, only to die another way in Braintree. (A daughter of Ferdinando's brother Thomas, she was thus a first cousin to Jonathan and Isaac. )
The families' marriages interwined them like strands in a rope, the strands long. Some Thayers are found in many of the places to which the Braintree Frenchs went over the next centuries. With Keziah's marriage later, a Ball strand that began outside of Braintree would be added.
First, they had to deal with attacks.
Attacks? Ferdinando had mis-judged the willingness of the native tribes to allow his plans for a large settlement. Predictably, their settlement was attacked. Fire took most of their records, as the Christianized among the natives trying to get their land returned had mostly chosen arson over murder. The Thayer party was allowed to leave. The large party retreated back to their old places for five or six years, mainly to Braintree.
Ferdinando and son Jonathan would be of record then, together, in Braintree, as they were then required to sign an oath of loyalty. (That oath would have been to the British king, not to the town.) It's assumed that's how Jonathan Thayer met Elizabeth French.
Then, most, but not all, returned to Mendon. Keziah's dates, places and marriage can be found in this modern Thayer family tree:
www.BobPatCoto.com/ThayerThomas1.html
Her parents (Samuel Thayer and Keziah Partridge) are definitely known. There had been confusion in older family trees over which of the many Balls she had married and where. The main genealogy book for her husband's Ball family skipped the marriage entirely, maybe as her time inside their family was so brief? Some pointed to that particular Elijah Ball born around 1744 (a calculated birth year), saying the wedding was in Mendon. (Had old Mendon yet split into parts?) Another source said that she married Elijah's brother, Josiah Ball, before she died at 19.
Official marriage records break the tie. They spell her name as "Kezia", so can be tricky to find. The groom was Elijah Ball, their marriage, Dec. 4, 1764. The location given was Milford, in Worcester County, but it was not carved out of Mendon until later. Source: "Massachusetts Marriages, 1695-1910". Indexed at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FCXD-FXN
Milford did not yet exist as its own town, but the church parish used to mark its boundaries did. Rays-Place.com says her marriage entry came from a church record. The same set of records show Elijah Ball marrying again, to Joannah French, spelled "Joanna". Her father, Abijah, would have been the nephew of Elizabeth French Thayer.
=================================================
ABOUT MILFORD: Writings of Rev. Adin Ballou.
In 1601, the "North Purchase" was added to Mendon. by 1731, two Ball brothers, Peter and Josiah, went into the North Purchase, coming from Watertown, an early-settled place north-ish of Boston. Their families would accumulate considerable land. In 1741, Mendon authorized a second church meant just for the North Purchase. The two churches, first and second, older and newer, served as meeting houses and voting places.
Records can become confusing, due to name changes for places. The North Purchase was renamed once the colonial legislature gave permission for a second church. The area was called the "Easterly Precinct" of Mendon. In the meantime, Josiah Ball had married Rachel Corbett/Corbet.
They lived inside that new precinct. The Easterly church building was finished by 1743, in time for Elijah Ball to be baptized there. Under the Puritan system, people usually were assigned a church according to the location of their land, so Keziah's parents remained at First Church. While Keziah married at her parents' church in what would remain as Mendon, she would then have attended the Easterly Precinct church of her new husband's parents (Josiah Ball and Rachel Corbett/Corbet), in what would become Milford. She would not be there for long, as she died so young.
Fifteen years after Keziah's death, the second precinct finally incorporated as its own town. The Second Church of Mendon then changed its name, became the First Congregational Church of Milford, same building and records, new title. It still exists, on Congress.
The children of Peter and Joshua Ball would sell their land and move on. Their migration out of Mendon/Milford to a different "new frontier" occurred a decade or so after Elijah found Joannah French of Braintree, as his new wife. Braintree, often spelled in its early days as "Braintrey" (a "sound-it-out" spelling), was nearer Boston, to its south, with iron forges and orchards and salt marshes. It lay close to riverside shipbuilding on the Weymouth River, another source of Thayer income.
MOVING ON. Did his prior in-laws, the numerous Thayers, play matchmaker regarding Joannah/Joanna French? Her father's aunt, Elizabeth French, was from the first generation of the Braintree-born. Her nephew was the first Abijah French, Joannah's father. He had been orphaned at around age 10, as his parents died in an epidemic that also took many elders among Abijah's uncles and aunts surnamed French. Abijah would marry Joannah Holbrook. Interestingly, Elijah Ball's grandmother on the Corbet side had been a Holbrook also. Multiple people may have encouraged Elijah to consider the younger Joannah French as his second wife.
How did old Thayer-French connections lead later to a new location, Orange, in what became Franklin County? They did this during Mendon's warrings with local natives over the old native village sites west of Braintree. These were past the Blue Hills in back of Braintree.
Once Mendon seemed safer, Elizabeth and Jonathan moved, over and beyond the Blue Hills, to old Mendon. At some point, Abijah would come as well. These hills were viewable by fishermen approaching from the ocean, early seen as Bleu Hills, Frenchified, due to early occupants not acknowledged by Puritans. "Blew Hills" was seen by the same sets that wrote "Braintrey".
FERDINANDO'S QUIRKS. Jonathan's father, the well-to-do Ferdinando Thayer, conveyed considerable land to all of his sons, including the two cited here, Elizabeth French's husband, Jonathan, and Keziah Thayer's grandfather, Isaac. The two men, full brothers to each other, were both by Huldah Holbrook.
The varied land changes were all to the chagrin of Ferdinando's 2nd wife. The marital battle over his land and his and his sons' alleged selling of alcohol to the natives? They were caught by court records stored in Boston as she sued for support.
As did Keziah, her great-uncle Jonathan Thayer would die "too young". This left Keziah's great-aunt by marriage, Elizabeth French Thayer, a widow. Elizabeth then re-married, to the widowed father-in-law of one of her daughters, Benjamin Wheelock Sr. Some of Benjamin's early descendants by his first wife would be raised in the Mendon/Milford area, then would migrate NW, up to the Massachusetts border, above Northampton in Hampshire County. They were barely below a future place to be called Vermont. The new place later became Orange in Franklin County, Mass.
Clearly, related groups had moved to that frontier together, for mutual support. It was a time with no EMS, no cops, no fire dept., and no daycare.
Having moved to the same small place on the moving frontier and in the same era, Capt. Alexander Wheelock and other Wheelocks are thus found in the same cemetery as two Elijah Balls. The elder Ball was the one born 1743-1744, who had married first Keziah Thayer and then Joannah French. With the second wife, they parented children born in both places, the old, near Boston, and the new, up by Vermont. Again, both wives of the elder Elijah Ball were related by marriage to each other, via earlier marriages between Thayers and Frenches. Both sets left behind many relatives in Braintree, Mass; both sets had been early settlers in a Puritan place, so continued to use Old Testament names for children and children, accounting for the use of Elijah and Keziah as names and the "real" spelling of any Joanna including one or two h's (Joannah, Johannah, with Hannah being a nickname for the second).
ELIJAH BALL. Beware of multiple Elijah Balls. A different one married Patience Rice. The younger Elijah Ball buried in Orange around 1750 was too old to be a son. However, the elder Elijah did have a son named Elijah with Joannah French in the 1770s.
SIDE NOTE. Experience Thayer, cousin to Isaac and Jonathan, descended from Thomas Thayer, a brother of Ferdinando who chose to stay in Braintree. Experience Thayer married Abijah French's eldest uncle.
Ironically, the big cause of death was not the first attacks on Mendon, but a slow plague of sorts that killed adults. Experience and her husband John French died in Braintree during the same epidemic years that left Abijah French an orphan at age 10 or so.
This writer's spouse is believed to descend from another uncle to Abijah French, Dependence, the one who survived past the epidemic years. He would have buried the rest. Two brothers, a sister, and two sisters-in-law, all died within about three years. His name was Puritan, signifying dependence upon God for mercy and other things that matter to the religious mindset. He would have understood the grief of her Elijah over burying Keziah so young. Dependence's first wife, a Marsh, had died, leaving a semi-orphaned daughter that his in-laws would raise as if she were their own. His children would be by Rebecca Fenno.
===================================================
Many early Mendon records were lost in the warrings with natives. However, Thayer land battles done in court, with records stored in Boston, saved much information.
The size of the Thayer family, with many sons keeping the name going, help in finding this family as they migrated. Plus, many sets of in-laws remembered in their family histories what others forgot, having moved to the same frontier places together.
==========================================================
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Jan., 2016. Updated, Sept. 2016, Aug. 2017. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
Scroll to ...Bottom (Grave List--Family, with links to eight known siblings)
Her great-grandfather, Ferdinando Thayer, had been the main builder of Mendon, east of Boston. Stories vary. He was famed, but also "a bit of a rake". Officially of Mendon in Sept. of 1663, he apparently led others there later. Paperwork kept back in Boston show he owned a 40-acre lot in Mendon by the 1670s. It was later divided between his sons. Of that large set, his son Isaac, born in Mendon to first wife Huldah, would be Keziah's grandfather. Another son, Jonathan, would marry Elizabeth French of Braintree and settle with her in Mendon. Holbrook in-laws of the Thayers and Frenches also hailed from Braintree.
Cementing his relationship with his own brothers, also preventing old family land from being taken in new court proceedings, Ferdinando conveyed his land in Braintree to his brothers. The brothers remained behind, good people, but not becoming wealthy like Ferdinando.
Cementing the brothers' relationships with the Frenches, Elizabeth French's elder brother, John French the junior, would marry Experience Thayer about 1685. They would also stay back in Braintree, unaffected by native attacks in Mendon, only to die another way in Braintree. (A daughter of Ferdinando's brother Thomas, she was thus a first cousin to Jonathan and Isaac. )
The families' marriages interwined them like strands in a rope, the strands long. Some Thayers are found in many of the places to which the Braintree Frenchs went over the next centuries. With Keziah's marriage later, a Ball strand that began outside of Braintree would be added.
First, they had to deal with attacks.
Attacks? Ferdinando had mis-judged the willingness of the native tribes to allow his plans for a large settlement. Predictably, their settlement was attacked. Fire took most of their records, as the Christianized among the natives trying to get their land returned had mostly chosen arson over murder. The Thayer party was allowed to leave. The large party retreated back to their old places for five or six years, mainly to Braintree.
Ferdinando and son Jonathan would be of record then, together, in Braintree, as they were then required to sign an oath of loyalty. (That oath would have been to the British king, not to the town.) It's assumed that's how Jonathan Thayer met Elizabeth French.
Then, most, but not all, returned to Mendon. Keziah's dates, places and marriage can be found in this modern Thayer family tree:
www.BobPatCoto.com/ThayerThomas1.html
Her parents (Samuel Thayer and Keziah Partridge) are definitely known. There had been confusion in older family trees over which of the many Balls she had married and where. The main genealogy book for her husband's Ball family skipped the marriage entirely, maybe as her time inside their family was so brief? Some pointed to that particular Elijah Ball born around 1744 (a calculated birth year), saying the wedding was in Mendon. (Had old Mendon yet split into parts?) Another source said that she married Elijah's brother, Josiah Ball, before she died at 19.
Official marriage records break the tie. They spell her name as "Kezia", so can be tricky to find. The groom was Elijah Ball, their marriage, Dec. 4, 1764. The location given was Milford, in Worcester County, but it was not carved out of Mendon until later. Source: "Massachusetts Marriages, 1695-1910". Indexed at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FCXD-FXN
Milford did not yet exist as its own town, but the church parish used to mark its boundaries did. Rays-Place.com says her marriage entry came from a church record. The same set of records show Elijah Ball marrying again, to Joannah French, spelled "Joanna". Her father, Abijah, would have been the nephew of Elizabeth French Thayer.
=================================================
ABOUT MILFORD: Writings of Rev. Adin Ballou.
In 1601, the "North Purchase" was added to Mendon. by 1731, two Ball brothers, Peter and Josiah, went into the North Purchase, coming from Watertown, an early-settled place north-ish of Boston. Their families would accumulate considerable land. In 1741, Mendon authorized a second church meant just for the North Purchase. The two churches, first and second, older and newer, served as meeting houses and voting places.
Records can become confusing, due to name changes for places. The North Purchase was renamed once the colonial legislature gave permission for a second church. The area was called the "Easterly Precinct" of Mendon. In the meantime, Josiah Ball had married Rachel Corbett/Corbet.
They lived inside that new precinct. The Easterly church building was finished by 1743, in time for Elijah Ball to be baptized there. Under the Puritan system, people usually were assigned a church according to the location of their land, so Keziah's parents remained at First Church. While Keziah married at her parents' church in what would remain as Mendon, she would then have attended the Easterly Precinct church of her new husband's parents (Josiah Ball and Rachel Corbett/Corbet), in what would become Milford. She would not be there for long, as she died so young.
Fifteen years after Keziah's death, the second precinct finally incorporated as its own town. The Second Church of Mendon then changed its name, became the First Congregational Church of Milford, same building and records, new title. It still exists, on Congress.
The children of Peter and Joshua Ball would sell their land and move on. Their migration out of Mendon/Milford to a different "new frontier" occurred a decade or so after Elijah found Joannah French of Braintree, as his new wife. Braintree, often spelled in its early days as "Braintrey" (a "sound-it-out" spelling), was nearer Boston, to its south, with iron forges and orchards and salt marshes. It lay close to riverside shipbuilding on the Weymouth River, another source of Thayer income.
MOVING ON. Did his prior in-laws, the numerous Thayers, play matchmaker regarding Joannah/Joanna French? Her father's aunt, Elizabeth French, was from the first generation of the Braintree-born. Her nephew was the first Abijah French, Joannah's father. He had been orphaned at around age 10, as his parents died in an epidemic that also took many elders among Abijah's uncles and aunts surnamed French. Abijah would marry Joannah Holbrook. Interestingly, Elijah Ball's grandmother on the Corbet side had been a Holbrook also. Multiple people may have encouraged Elijah to consider the younger Joannah French as his second wife.
How did old Thayer-French connections lead later to a new location, Orange, in what became Franklin County? They did this during Mendon's warrings with local natives over the old native village sites west of Braintree. These were past the Blue Hills in back of Braintree.
Once Mendon seemed safer, Elizabeth and Jonathan moved, over and beyond the Blue Hills, to old Mendon. At some point, Abijah would come as well. These hills were viewable by fishermen approaching from the ocean, early seen as Bleu Hills, Frenchified, due to early occupants not acknowledged by Puritans. "Blew Hills" was seen by the same sets that wrote "Braintrey".
FERDINANDO'S QUIRKS. Jonathan's father, the well-to-do Ferdinando Thayer, conveyed considerable land to all of his sons, including the two cited here, Elizabeth French's husband, Jonathan, and Keziah Thayer's grandfather, Isaac. The two men, full brothers to each other, were both by Huldah Holbrook.
The varied land changes were all to the chagrin of Ferdinando's 2nd wife. The marital battle over his land and his and his sons' alleged selling of alcohol to the natives? They were caught by court records stored in Boston as she sued for support.
As did Keziah, her great-uncle Jonathan Thayer would die "too young". This left Keziah's great-aunt by marriage, Elizabeth French Thayer, a widow. Elizabeth then re-married, to the widowed father-in-law of one of her daughters, Benjamin Wheelock Sr. Some of Benjamin's early descendants by his first wife would be raised in the Mendon/Milford area, then would migrate NW, up to the Massachusetts border, above Northampton in Hampshire County. They were barely below a future place to be called Vermont. The new place later became Orange in Franklin County, Mass.
Clearly, related groups had moved to that frontier together, for mutual support. It was a time with no EMS, no cops, no fire dept., and no daycare.
Having moved to the same small place on the moving frontier and in the same era, Capt. Alexander Wheelock and other Wheelocks are thus found in the same cemetery as two Elijah Balls. The elder Ball was the one born 1743-1744, who had married first Keziah Thayer and then Joannah French. With the second wife, they parented children born in both places, the old, near Boston, and the new, up by Vermont. Again, both wives of the elder Elijah Ball were related by marriage to each other, via earlier marriages between Thayers and Frenches. Both sets left behind many relatives in Braintree, Mass; both sets had been early settlers in a Puritan place, so continued to use Old Testament names for children and children, accounting for the use of Elijah and Keziah as names and the "real" spelling of any Joanna including one or two h's (Joannah, Johannah, with Hannah being a nickname for the second).
ELIJAH BALL. Beware of multiple Elijah Balls. A different one married Patience Rice. The younger Elijah Ball buried in Orange around 1750 was too old to be a son. However, the elder Elijah did have a son named Elijah with Joannah French in the 1770s.
SIDE NOTE. Experience Thayer, cousin to Isaac and Jonathan, descended from Thomas Thayer, a brother of Ferdinando who chose to stay in Braintree. Experience Thayer married Abijah French's eldest uncle.
Ironically, the big cause of death was not the first attacks on Mendon, but a slow plague of sorts that killed adults. Experience and her husband John French died in Braintree during the same epidemic years that left Abijah French an orphan at age 10 or so.
This writer's spouse is believed to descend from another uncle to Abijah French, Dependence, the one who survived past the epidemic years. He would have buried the rest. Two brothers, a sister, and two sisters-in-law, all died within about three years. His name was Puritan, signifying dependence upon God for mercy and other things that matter to the religious mindset. He would have understood the grief of her Elijah over burying Keziah so young. Dependence's first wife, a Marsh, had died, leaving a semi-orphaned daughter that his in-laws would raise as if she were their own. His children would be by Rebecca Fenno.
===================================================
Many early Mendon records were lost in the warrings with natives. However, Thayer land battles done in court, with records stored in Boston, saved much information.
The size of the Thayer family, with many sons keeping the name going, help in finding this family as they migrated. Plus, many sets of in-laws remembered in their family histories what others forgot, having moved to the same frontier places together.
==========================================================
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Jan., 2016. Updated, Sept. 2016, Aug. 2017. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
In progress (ending needs clean-up) ..
Scroll to ...Bottom (Grave List--Family, with links to eight known siblings)
Her great-grandfather, Ferdinando Thayer, had been the main builder of Mendon, east of Boston. Stories vary. He was famed, but also "a bit of a rake". Officially of Mendon in Sept. of 1663, he apparently led others there later. Paperwork kept back in Boston show he owned a 40-acre lot in Mendon by the 1670s. It was later divided between his sons. Of that large set, his son Isaac, born in Mendon to first wife Huldah, would be Keziah's grandfather. Another son, Jonathan, would marry Elizabeth French of Braintree and settle with her in Mendon. Holbrook in-laws of the Thayers and Frenches also hailed from Braintree.
Cementing his relationship with his own brothers, also preventing old family land from being taken in new court proceedings, Ferdinando conveyed his land in Braintree to his brothers. The brothers remained behind, good people, but not becoming wealthy like Ferdinando.
Cementing the brothers' relationships with the Frenches, Elizabeth French's elder brother, John French the junior, would marry Experience Thayer about 1685. They would also stay back in Braintree, unaffected by native attacks in Mendon, only to die another way in Braintree. (A daughter of Ferdinando's brother Thomas, she was thus a first cousin to Jonathan and Isaac. )
The families' marriages interwined them like strands in a rope, the strands long. Some Thayers are found in many of the places to which the Braintree Frenchs went over the next centuries. With Keziah's marriage later, a Ball strand that began outside of Braintree would be added.
First, they had to deal with attacks.
Attacks? Ferdinando had mis-judged the willingness of the native tribes to allow his plans for a large settlement. Predictably, their settlement was attacked. Fire took most of their records, as the Christianized among the natives trying to get their land returned had mostly chosen arson over murder. The Thayer party was allowed to leave. The large party retreated back to their old places for five or six years, mainly to Braintree.
Ferdinando and son Jonathan would be of record then, together, in Braintree, as they were then required to sign an oath of loyalty. (That oath would have been to the British king, not to the town.) It's assumed that's how Jonathan Thayer met Elizabeth French.
Then, most, but not all, returned to Mendon. Keziah's dates, places and marriage can be found in this modern Thayer family tree:
www.BobPatCoto.com/ThayerThomas1.html
Her parents (Samuel Thayer and Keziah Partridge) are definitely known. There had been confusion in older family trees over which of the many Balls she had married and where. The main genealogy book for her husband's Ball family skipped the marriage entirely, maybe as her time inside their family was so brief? Some pointed to that particular Elijah Ball born around 1744 (a calculated birth year), saying the wedding was in Mendon. (Had old Mendon yet split into parts?) Another source said that she married Elijah's brother, Josiah Ball, before she died at 19.
Official marriage records break the tie. They spell her name as "Kezia", so can be tricky to find. The groom was Elijah Ball, their marriage, Dec. 4, 1764. The location given was Milford, in Worcester County, but it was not carved out of Mendon until later. Source: "Massachusetts Marriages, 1695-1910". Indexed at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FCXD-FXN
Milford did not yet exist as its own town, but the church parish used to mark its boundaries did. Rays-Place.com says her marriage entry came from a church record. The same set of records show Elijah Ball marrying again, to Joannah French, spelled "Joanna". Her father, Abijah, would have been the nephew of Elizabeth French Thayer.
=================================================
ABOUT MILFORD: Writings of Rev. Adin Ballou.
In 1601, the "North Purchase" was added to Mendon. by 1731, two Ball brothers, Peter and Josiah, went into the North Purchase, coming from Watertown, an early-settled place north-ish of Boston. Their families would accumulate considerable land. In 1741, Mendon authorized a second church meant just for the North Purchase. The two churches, first and second, older and newer, served as meeting houses and voting places.
Records can become confusing, due to name changes for places. The North Purchase was renamed once the colonial legislature gave permission for a second church. The area was called the "Easterly Precinct" of Mendon. In the meantime, Josiah Ball had married Rachel Corbett/Corbet.
They lived inside that new precinct. The Easterly church building was finished by 1743, in time for Elijah Ball to be baptized there. Under the Puritan system, people usually were assigned a church according to the location of their land, so Keziah's parents remained at First Church. While Keziah married at her parents' church in what would remain as Mendon, she would then have attended the Easterly Precinct church of her new husband's parents (Josiah Ball and Rachel Corbett/Corbet), in what would become Milford. She would not be there for long, as she died so young.
Fifteen years after Keziah's death, the second precinct finally incorporated as its own town. The Second Church of Mendon then changed its name, became the First Congregational Church of Milford, same building and records, new title. It still exists, on Congress.
The children of Peter and Joshua Ball would sell their land and move on. Their migration out of Mendon/Milford to a different "new frontier" occurred a decade or so after Elijah found Joannah French of Braintree, as his new wife. Braintree, often spelled in its early days as "Braintrey" (a "sound-it-out" spelling), was nearer Boston, to its south, with iron forges and orchards and salt marshes. It lay close to riverside shipbuilding on the Weymouth River, another source of Thayer income.
MOVING ON. Did his prior in-laws, the numerous Thayers, play matchmaker regarding Joannah/Joanna French? Her father's aunt, Elizabeth French, was from the first generation of the Braintree-born. Her nephew was the first Abijah French, Joannah's father. He had been orphaned at around age 10, as his parents died in an epidemic that also took many elders among Abijah's uncles and aunts surnamed French. Abijah would marry Joannah Holbrook. Interestingly, Elijah Ball's grandmother on the Corbet side had been a Holbrook also. Multiple people may have encouraged Elijah to consider the younger Joannah French as his second wife.
How did old Thayer-French connections lead later to a new location, Orange, in what became Franklin County? They did this during Mendon's warrings with local natives over the old native village sites west of Braintree. These were past the Blue Hills in back of Braintree.
Once Mendon seemed safer, Elizabeth and Jonathan moved, over and beyond the Blue Hills, to old Mendon. At some point, Abijah would come as well. These hills were viewable by fishermen approaching from the ocean, early seen as Bleu Hills, Frenchified, due to early occupants not acknowledged by Puritans. "Blew Hills" was seen by the same sets that wrote "Braintrey".
FERDINANDO'S QUIRKS. Jonathan's father, the well-to-do Ferdinando Thayer, conveyed considerable land to all of his sons, including the two cited here, Elizabeth French's husband, Jonathan, and Keziah Thayer's grandfather, Isaac. The two men, full brothers to each other, were both by Huldah Holbrook.
The varied land changes were all to the chagrin of Ferdinando's 2nd wife. The marital battle over his land and his and his sons' alleged selling of alcohol to the natives? They were caught by court records stored in Boston as she sued for support.
As did Keziah, her great-uncle Jonathan Thayer would die "too young". This left Keziah's great-aunt by marriage, Elizabeth French Thayer, a widow. Elizabeth then re-married, to the widowed father-in-law of one of her daughters, Benjamin Wheelock Sr. Some of Benjamin's early descendants by his first wife would be raised in the Mendon/Milford area, then would migrate NW, up to the Massachusetts border, above Northampton in Hampshire County. They were barely below a future place to be called Vermont. The new place later became Orange in Franklin County, Mass.
Clearly, related groups had moved to that frontier together, for mutual support. It was a time with no EMS, no cops, no fire dept., and no daycare.
Having moved to the same small place on the moving frontier and in the same era, Capt. Alexander Wheelock and other Wheelocks are thus found in the same cemetery as two Elijah Balls. The elder Ball was the one born 1743-1744, who had married first Keziah Thayer and then Joannah French. With the second wife, they parented children born in both places, the old, near Boston, and the new, up by Vermont. Again, both wives of the elder Elijah Ball were related by marriage to each other, via earlier marriages between Thayers and Frenches. Both sets left behind many relatives in Braintree, Mass; both sets had been early settlers in a Puritan place, so continued to use Old Testament names for children and children, accounting for the use of Elijah and Keziah as names and the "real" spelling of any Joanna including one or two h's (Joannah, Johannah, with Hannah being a nickname for the second).
ELIJAH BALL. Beware of multiple Elijah Balls. A different one married Patience Rice. The younger Elijah Ball buried in Orange around 1750 was too old to be a son. However, the elder Elijah did have a son named Elijah with Joannah French in the 1770s.
SIDE NOTE. Experience Thayer, cousin to Isaac and Jonathan, descended from Thomas Thayer, a brother of Ferdinando who chose to stay in Braintree. Experience Thayer married Abijah French's eldest uncle.
Ironically, the big cause of death was not the first attacks on Mendon, but a slow plague of sorts that killed adults. Experience and her husband John French died in Braintree during the same epidemic years that left Abijah French an orphan at age 10 or so.
This writer's spouse is believed to descend from another uncle to Abijah French, Dependence, the one who survived past the epidemic years. He would have buried the rest. Two brothers, a sister, and two sisters-in-law, all died within about three years. His name was Puritan, signifying dependence upon God for mercy and other things that matter to the religious mindset. He would have understood the grief of her Elijah over burying Keziah so young. Dependence's first wife, a Marsh, had died, leaving a semi-orphaned daughter that his in-laws would raise as if she were their own. His children would be by Rebecca Fenno.
===================================================
Many early Mendon records were lost in the warrings with natives. However, Thayer land battles done in court, with records stored in Boston, saved much information.
The size of the Thayer family, with many sons keeping the name going, help in finding this family as they migrated. Plus, many sets of in-laws remembered in their family histories what others forgot, having moved to the same frontier places together.
==========================================================
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Jan., 2016. Updated, Sept. 2016, Aug. 2017. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
Scroll to ...Bottom (Grave List--Family, with links to eight known siblings)
Her great-grandfather, Ferdinando Thayer, had been the main builder of Mendon, east of Boston. Stories vary. He was famed, but also "a bit of a rake". Officially of Mendon in Sept. of 1663, he apparently led others there later. Paperwork kept back in Boston show he owned a 40-acre lot in Mendon by the 1670s. It was later divided between his sons. Of that large set, his son Isaac, born in Mendon to first wife Huldah, would be Keziah's grandfather. Another son, Jonathan, would marry Elizabeth French of Braintree and settle with her in Mendon. Holbrook in-laws of the Thayers and Frenches also hailed from Braintree.
Cementing his relationship with his own brothers, also preventing old family land from being taken in new court proceedings, Ferdinando conveyed his land in Braintree to his brothers. The brothers remained behind, good people, but not becoming wealthy like Ferdinando.
Cementing the brothers' relationships with the Frenches, Elizabeth French's elder brother, John French the junior, would marry Experience Thayer about 1685. They would also stay back in Braintree, unaffected by native attacks in Mendon, only to die another way in Braintree. (A daughter of Ferdinando's brother Thomas, she was thus a first cousin to Jonathan and Isaac. )
The families' marriages interwined them like strands in a rope, the strands long. Some Thayers are found in many of the places to which the Braintree Frenchs went over the next centuries. With Keziah's marriage later, a Ball strand that began outside of Braintree would be added.
First, they had to deal with attacks.
Attacks? Ferdinando had mis-judged the willingness of the native tribes to allow his plans for a large settlement. Predictably, their settlement was attacked. Fire took most of their records, as the Christianized among the natives trying to get their land returned had mostly chosen arson over murder. The Thayer party was allowed to leave. The large party retreated back to their old places for five or six years, mainly to Braintree.
Ferdinando and son Jonathan would be of record then, together, in Braintree, as they were then required to sign an oath of loyalty. (That oath would have been to the British king, not to the town.) It's assumed that's how Jonathan Thayer met Elizabeth French.
Then, most, but not all, returned to Mendon. Keziah's dates, places and marriage can be found in this modern Thayer family tree:
www.BobPatCoto.com/ThayerThomas1.html
Her parents (Samuel Thayer and Keziah Partridge) are definitely known. There had been confusion in older family trees over which of the many Balls she had married and where. The main genealogy book for her husband's Ball family skipped the marriage entirely, maybe as her time inside their family was so brief? Some pointed to that particular Elijah Ball born around 1744 (a calculated birth year), saying the wedding was in Mendon. (Had old Mendon yet split into parts?) Another source said that she married Elijah's brother, Josiah Ball, before she died at 19.
Official marriage records break the tie. They spell her name as "Kezia", so can be tricky to find. The groom was Elijah Ball, their marriage, Dec. 4, 1764. The location given was Milford, in Worcester County, but it was not carved out of Mendon until later. Source: "Massachusetts Marriages, 1695-1910". Indexed at FamilySearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:FCXD-FXN
Milford did not yet exist as its own town, but the church parish used to mark its boundaries did. Rays-Place.com says her marriage entry came from a church record. The same set of records show Elijah Ball marrying again, to Joannah French, spelled "Joanna". Her father, Abijah, would have been the nephew of Elizabeth French Thayer.
=================================================
ABOUT MILFORD: Writings of Rev. Adin Ballou.
In 1601, the "North Purchase" was added to Mendon. by 1731, two Ball brothers, Peter and Josiah, went into the North Purchase, coming from Watertown, an early-settled place north-ish of Boston. Their families would accumulate considerable land. In 1741, Mendon authorized a second church meant just for the North Purchase. The two churches, first and second, older and newer, served as meeting houses and voting places.
Records can become confusing, due to name changes for places. The North Purchase was renamed once the colonial legislature gave permission for a second church. The area was called the "Easterly Precinct" of Mendon. In the meantime, Josiah Ball had married Rachel Corbett/Corbet.
They lived inside that new precinct. The Easterly church building was finished by 1743, in time for Elijah Ball to be baptized there. Under the Puritan system, people usually were assigned a church according to the location of their land, so Keziah's parents remained at First Church. While Keziah married at her parents' church in what would remain as Mendon, she would then have attended the Easterly Precinct church of her new husband's parents (Josiah Ball and Rachel Corbett/Corbet), in what would become Milford. She would not be there for long, as she died so young.
Fifteen years after Keziah's death, the second precinct finally incorporated as its own town. The Second Church of Mendon then changed its name, became the First Congregational Church of Milford, same building and records, new title. It still exists, on Congress.
The children of Peter and Joshua Ball would sell their land and move on. Their migration out of Mendon/Milford to a different "new frontier" occurred a decade or so after Elijah found Joannah French of Braintree, as his new wife. Braintree, often spelled in its early days as "Braintrey" (a "sound-it-out" spelling), was nearer Boston, to its south, with iron forges and orchards and salt marshes. It lay close to riverside shipbuilding on the Weymouth River, another source of Thayer income.
MOVING ON. Did his prior in-laws, the numerous Thayers, play matchmaker regarding Joannah/Joanna French? Her father's aunt, Elizabeth French, was from the first generation of the Braintree-born. Her nephew was the first Abijah French, Joannah's father. He had been orphaned at around age 10, as his parents died in an epidemic that also took many elders among Abijah's uncles and aunts surnamed French. Abijah would marry Joannah Holbrook. Interestingly, Elijah Ball's grandmother on the Corbet side had been a Holbrook also. Multiple people may have encouraged Elijah to consider the younger Joannah French as his second wife.
How did old Thayer-French connections lead later to a new location, Orange, in what became Franklin County? They did this during Mendon's warrings with local natives over the old native village sites west of Braintree. These were past the Blue Hills in back of Braintree.
Once Mendon seemed safer, Elizabeth and Jonathan moved, over and beyond the Blue Hills, to old Mendon. At some point, Abijah would come as well. These hills were viewable by fishermen approaching from the ocean, early seen as Bleu Hills, Frenchified, due to early occupants not acknowledged by Puritans. "Blew Hills" was seen by the same sets that wrote "Braintrey".
FERDINANDO'S QUIRKS. Jonathan's father, the well-to-do Ferdinando Thayer, conveyed considerable land to all of his sons, including the two cited here, Elizabeth French's husband, Jonathan, and Keziah Thayer's grandfather, Isaac. The two men, full brothers to each other, were both by Huldah Holbrook.
The varied land changes were all to the chagrin of Ferdinando's 2nd wife. The marital battle over his land and his and his sons' alleged selling of alcohol to the natives? They were caught by court records stored in Boston as she sued for support.
As did Keziah, her great-uncle Jonathan Thayer would die "too young". This left Keziah's great-aunt by marriage, Elizabeth French Thayer, a widow. Elizabeth then re-married, to the widowed father-in-law of one of her daughters, Benjamin Wheelock Sr. Some of Benjamin's early descendants by his first wife would be raised in the Mendon/Milford area, then would migrate NW, up to the Massachusetts border, above Northampton in Hampshire County. They were barely below a future place to be called Vermont. The new place later became Orange in Franklin County, Mass.
Clearly, related groups had moved to that frontier together, for mutual support. It was a time with no EMS, no cops, no fire dept., and no daycare.
Having moved to the same small place on the moving frontier and in the same era, Capt. Alexander Wheelock and other Wheelocks are thus found in the same cemetery as two Elijah Balls. The elder Ball was the one born 1743-1744, who had married first Keziah Thayer and then Joannah French. With the second wife, they parented children born in both places, the old, near Boston, and the new, up by Vermont. Again, both wives of the elder Elijah Ball were related by marriage to each other, via earlier marriages between Thayers and Frenches. Both sets left behind many relatives in Braintree, Mass; both sets had been early settlers in a Puritan place, so continued to use Old Testament names for children and children, accounting for the use of Elijah and Keziah as names and the "real" spelling of any Joanna including one or two h's (Joannah, Johannah, with Hannah being a nickname for the second).
ELIJAH BALL. Beware of multiple Elijah Balls. A different one married Patience Rice. The younger Elijah Ball buried in Orange around 1750 was too old to be a son. However, the elder Elijah did have a son named Elijah with Joannah French in the 1770s.
SIDE NOTE. Experience Thayer, cousin to Isaac and Jonathan, descended from Thomas Thayer, a brother of Ferdinando who chose to stay in Braintree. Experience Thayer married Abijah French's eldest uncle.
Ironically, the big cause of death was not the first attacks on Mendon, but a slow plague of sorts that killed adults. Experience and her husband John French died in Braintree during the same epidemic years that left Abijah French an orphan at age 10 or so.
This writer's spouse is believed to descend from another uncle to Abijah French, Dependence, the one who survived past the epidemic years. He would have buried the rest. Two brothers, a sister, and two sisters-in-law, all died within about three years. His name was Puritan, signifying dependence upon God for mercy and other things that matter to the religious mindset. He would have understood the grief of her Elijah over burying Keziah so young. Dependence's first wife, a Marsh, had died, leaving a semi-orphaned daughter that his in-laws would raise as if she were their own. His children would be by Rebecca Fenno.
===================================================
Many early Mendon records were lost in the warrings with natives. However, Thayer land battles done in court, with records stored in Boston, saved much information.
The size of the Thayer family, with many sons keeping the name going, help in finding this family as they migrated. Plus, many sets of in-laws remembered in their family histories what others forgot, having moved to the same frontier places together.
==========================================================
Copyright by JBrown, Julia Brown, Austin, TX, Jan., 2016. Updated, Sept. 2016, Aug. 2017. Permission given to Findagrave for use at this page.
Family Members
Advertisement
Advertisement
