OBEDIAH NEWTON4 (Thomas3, John2, Richard1), son of Thomas and Record (Ward) Newton of Marlborough and Shrewsbury, Mass., was born at Marlborough, January 6, 1702, and died in Grafton, Mass., May 11, 1753, aged 51. His estate was administered without a will, in Grafton, in 1753. Case in Probate, No. 43,348.
He married about 1724 or 25, Abigail ---.
The township of Shrewsbury was incorporated December 15, 1727, ten years after it was granted as a township. The town was settled mostly by people from Marlborough, Mass. At the first town meeting after that date Shrewsbury included what is now Boylston, most of West Boylston, a small part of Sterling, Westborough and Grafton. In 1741, Obediah Newton, who had settled in the town, together with three other families and their farms were set off and annexed to Grafton. Thus we find a record of the births of his children in the towns of Shrewsbury, Westborough and Grafton, and baptisms of some of them in Grafton.
The death of his wife, Abigail, does not appear, and he may have had a second wife, Ruth ---; for in the baptism records at Grafton some of the children are credited to "Obediah and Ruth", namely: John, Jonas, and the first Thadeus. There is an error somewhere.
[Note: the speculation about a wife Ruth is misplaced. There are references to Abigail both before and after the records mentioning Ruth, and Ruth is mentioned only in a sequence of baptism records in Grafton, even though the birth records for some of the same children list Abigail as the mother. It appears almost certainly to be a clerical error by a single church clerk.]
