Person:Nathan Lord (4)

link

In the April 2010 issue of The American Genealogist [TAG], this author and Joseph C. Anderson II, FASG, examined the English origins of Nathan1 Lord of Berwick and Kittery.1 The article also provided an account of Abraham Conley, a man with whom Nathan was long associated in early Maine. The authors were successful in specifically identifying the English origins of both of these men, as well as their relationship to each other. This helped resolve many of the errors in earlier accounts of this family.

Nathan1 Lord was born on 1 September 1633 in Rye, co. Sussex, England, the son of NathanA (AbrahamB) and Anne (—) Lord. His father, a shoemaker, died within a year, and was buried on 1 February 1633/4.5 Nathan’s mother, Anne, married as her second husband, at nearby Wittersham, co. Kent, 1 January 1634/5, Abraham Conley, a 31-year-old bachelor and clothworker.6 Nathan first arrived in Maine in 1637 or 1638 as a small child his mother and stepfather, Abraham Conley. On 5 January 1638/9 Abraham Conley was in possession of a house and six acres in Kittery which he had purchased from John Ugrove.7 Nathan Lord and Abraham Conley had a lifelong relationship, with Abraham acting as Nathan’s de facto father from earliest memory.

5 Rye, co. Sussex, England, parish register [Family History Library (FHL), Salt Lake City, film #1,067,288]. The administration of the estate of Nathan Lord of Rye was granted to the relict, Anne Lord, 29 April 1634 (Act Book for the Archdeaconry of Lewes, Book B6 [FHL film #97,306]).
6 Marriage License Registers of the Diocese of Canterbury, v. 13, 1623–35, f. 151 [FHL film #1,836,332]. Also, Wittersham, co. Kent, parish register [FHL film #2,355,255]. 7 York County Register of Deeds, York Deeds, 18 vols. in 19 (Portland, 1887–1910), 5:183

NATHAN1 LORD was baptized on 1 September 1633 in Rye, Sussex, England, son of NathanA (AbrahamB) and Anne (—) Lord. He died in Kittery before 13 February 1690/1, when the inventory of his estate was returned. He married at Kittery, about 1655, MARTHA EVERETT, born probably in Dover, New Hampshire, about 1640,19 daughter of William and Margery (—) Everett.20 She died after 1 Dec.
1730 when she sold property to John Cooper.21

Nathan Lord first appeared in the Maine records at the age of nineteen when he signed the submission to Massachusetts in November 1652.8 Later that year, on 18 December 1652, he received his first grant of land, 60 acres of upland and meadow at the Healthy Marsh in Kittery.9 In 1657 he signed the petition to the Lord Protector setting forth the reasons why the Province of Maine should continue to be under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts.10 In October of 1662 he signed a petition to the General Court of Massachusetts asking for protection.11 Nathan, sometimes called Nathaniel, appears in numerous land transactions in the town of Kittery which extended into the present-day towns of Eliot, Berwick, South Berwick, North Berwick, and Lebanon. On 12 May 1674 Nathan Lord was granted administration of the estate of his brother-in-law William Everett Jr.,12 establishing that his wife, Martha, was the sister of William Everett and the daughter of William and Margery (—) Everett.13 While A History of the Descendants of Nathan Lord asserted that Nathan had married first Judith Conley, reportedly a daughter of Abraham Conley by a wife antecedent to Anne Lord,14 Abraham Conley, as noted above, was a bachelor at the time of his marriage to Anne Lord. No evidence was discovered for an earlier wife of Nathan Lord.
In his will of 1 March 1674, Abraham Conley left “Nathan Lord the elder my sone in law [i.e., stepson] all that land that Nicholas Frost now holdeth of me and all the other land either marsh meadow or upland that I now have or ought to have at Sturgeon Creeke, (besides that I have lett or granted unto the aforesd Francis Small).”15 He also left property to Nathan’s two eldest sons. On 1 April 1681, Nathan Lord Sr. sold to Nathan Lord Jr. the house, barn, and three tracts of land he had purchased of Abraham Conley. Nathan died by 13 February 1690/1 when the inventory on his estate was returned.16 His widow, Martha, lived a long life and deeded property multiple times after his death. On 12 March 1709 she turned the home place at Mount Misery in Berwick over to her son Benjamin with life reservations.17 On 30 March 1713, Martha Lord granted what had been her husband’s original grant in Kittery to three of her sons-in-law, leaving John Cooper, Tobias Hanson, and Moses Littlefield “sixty-seven acres of land, sixty of which were granted to Nathan Lord by the town of Kittery, December 18, 1652, and seven granted to Abraham Conley, September 28, 1653.”18 Nathan Lord had nine children, at least fifty grandchildren, and great-children who numbered in the hundreds.

8 Gen. Dict. Maine & N.H, 443, referencing List 282.
9 York Deeds, 7:482.
10 Gen. Dict. Maine & N.H., 5, referencing List 24.
11 Province and Court Records of Maine, 6 vols., eds. Charles Thorton Libby (vols. 1–2), Robert Earle Moody (vol. 3), and Neal Woodside Allen Jr. (vols. 4–6) (Portland, 1928–1975), 1:199
12 Maine Province and Court Records, 2:490–91.
13 Margery (—) Everett married as her 2nd husband Isaac Nash, as proven by a 20 June 1656 deed in which Isaac Nash of Dover, shipwright, and Margery Nash his wife, sell property to William Leighton that “was Erected by my late predessor [sic] William Everett, whose wife I have now married” (York Deeds, 1:132).
14 Lord, Descendants of Nathan Lord, 189.
15 William M. Sargent, Maine Wills, 1640–1760 (Portland, Maine, 1887), 96–97, citing York
Co. Probate Records, 5:74 (hereafter cited as Sargent, Maine Wills).

This account has errors that have been corrected in The American Genealogist & The Maine Genealogist above

This account has errors that have been corrected in The American Genealogist & The Maine Genealogist above