Person:Grace Unknown (105)

Grace is thought to be the daughter of a Welsh farmer. Story of two suitors for Grace's hand and she agreed to marry the better reaper. During the reaping she helped Thomas thus insuring that he would finish first. As reprinted in a Hatch newsletter in the 1920s:

"Miss Grace, it seems, was a very winsome and popular young woman and Thomas had more than one rival for her heart, and hand. But the contest finally simmered down to Thomas and one other, and Miss Grace found it difficult to decide which she liked the better. Finally, as they were farmers, it was agreed by all concerned that fate should be determined by a reaping match, he who could reap a certain equal measured portion of a field of grain, to get the prize. And Miss Grace, being herself a farmer's daughter and a skillful reaper determined that she also would have a hand in the contest that was to decide her fate. Consequently she, with true feminine diplomacy, had her equal portion staked out between the other two and the contest began. Reaping grain at that time was done by the hand sickle. In the meantime as her fate was so near a determination, Miss Grace did some vigorous thinking as is apt to be the case when events of serious consequences are imminent and having concluded that, on the whole, she rather liked Thomas a little the better, she slyly cut over a little onto Thomas' portion, thus enabling him to finish slightly ahead." (reprinted at http://www.geocities.com/~weekseekers/hatch.html)

It was noted by Otis in Barnstable Families, that he assume that Grace was step-mother to Jonathan and Lydia. He assumes this by the manner that they left Jonathan to apprentice in Salem when they moved to Yarmouth. Grace allowed them in youth to have been aliens from their father's home and exposed to all the temptations of a wicked world. Otis thinks that Grace overruled her husband Thomas in allowing these things to happen. NOTE: Grace was mother, not stepmother. For help in separating the two men named Thomas Hatch, see Source:Anderson, Robert Charles. Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, II:875-876 for this family and Source:Davis, Walter Goodwin. Massachusetts and Maine Families, II:224-225 (Hatch, of Scituate) for the contemporary Thomas Hatch.

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Barnstable Town Clerk's records Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families - Otis Pack says 1728. The other two say 1721.
2. ↑ Thomas Hatch, in Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995)
   II:876.

   She was alive on 27 June 1661 [MD 17:160], but had probably died by 3 March 1662/3 [PCR 4:31].

3. ↑ "Grace Hatch late wife of the abovesaid Thomas Hatch deceased" deposed to the inventory on 27 June 1661. Her children were administering the estate alone in papers filed in March 1662/3.
4. ↑ No basis for this surname is provided.