Person:Samuel Jackson (6)

While Samuel and his father Henry Jackson are covered well by Jacobus' book "History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield", Jacobus' later work "The Ancestry of Lorenzo Ackley..... has more complete info that wasn't available when the first work was published. The following is from page 236 of the latter book:

"Besides one child by Phebe, Samuel had by previous wives, thirteen children born between the late 1660’s or the early 1670’s and 1701, a spread of nearly thirty years, which suggests that he may have had two wives before he married Phebe. It is suspected that the mother of the younger children beginning with Henry (b. 1679) and including Abigail (b. say 1696) was named Jedidah, for both Henry and Abigail, although they lived in different towns after marriage, gave to their respective first-born daughters the unusual name of Jedidah. This name is found at that period in only one of the Fairfield-Stratford families. Thomas Skidmore (d. at Fairfield, 1684) had a daughter Jedidah who married Edward Higbee and had four children by 1660; his grandson John Skidmore (d. at Stratford, 1740/1) had a son Thomas Skidmore of Newtorn, Conn., who named a daughter Jedidah, suggesting that the name may also have been used in the intervening Skidmore generations where the family groups are not completely known. This is entirely theoretical, but the mother of Henry Jackson may have been named Jedidah and may have been a granddaughter of Thomas Skidmore, either a Skidmore or a Higbee."

Mary Banning Friedlander pointed out in 1999 that Samuel Jackson's wife could not have been a daughter of Edward and Jedidah (Skidmore) Higbee (although her first name could still have been Jedidah, for the reason given by Jacobus). Friedlander also did not seem to think that Samuel had more than one wife before Phebe.^[4]

1. ↑ Jacobus, Donald Lines. History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield. (New Haven, Conn.: The Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Company, 1930-1932)
   Vol 1:pgs 319, 320, 321.
2. ↑ Fairfield County, Connecticut, USA, USGenWeb, "Probate Abstracts Index," USGenWeb Project, The USGenWeb PRojec.

   'JACKSON, Samuel, late of Stratfield, will dated Aug. 30, 1712, probated Dec. 1, 1714 ... Inventory taken Feb. 12, 1714/5, ...'

3. ↑ pg 225, in Jacobus, Donald Lines, Editor, and N. Grier Parke (Compiler and Publisher). The Ancestry of Lorenzo Ackley & his wife Emma Arabella Bosworth. (Woodstock, Vt.: N.G. Parke, 1960).

   "Samuel Jackson, born probably somewhere around 1645, died at Fairfield."

4. ↑ The Connecticut Nutmegger. (East Hartford, Connecticut: Connecticut Society of Genealogists)
   32 (1999):194.