Person talk:Hannah Clark (64)

Death date [8 January 2018]

Confusion regarding death date. Some sources say she died in 1690, but others say she not only lived well past 1690 but had all of her children after 1690. Perhaps there were multiple Hannah Clarks?

Since the marriage to Ebenezer Mason is in 1691, and the death is in 1690, there is a clear dichotomy here. Either she didn't die or she didn't marry Ebenezer Mason. It should not be too hard to figure out.

First of all, secondary sources can say what they want, but it does not make it true when they say it. When they disagree the approach is to look for primary sources. If those can be found, they almost always provide the answer. And they do here.

Yes, Medfield VRs, p. 201, show the death of a Hannah Clark in 1690. She is not identified as anybody's wife or daughter (see below for more), but somebody did die.

The probate of Benjamin Clark (Suffolk 5009) contains a will written in 1720/21 that names his daughter Hannah Mason, and Ebenezer and Hannah Mason signed their assent to proving of the will. So Benjamin's daughter did live well past 1690, and clearly had all her children after that date since she did not marry Ebenezer Mason until 1691.

That solves the problem of Benjamin's daughter. The other half of the problem is still open.

The death date belongs to somebody else. There is no sign of another Hannah Clark in Medfield, having checked for births to a woman named Hannah Clark, marriages by men named Clark to women named Hannah, and other signs that a woman named Hannah Clark would have been in Medfield or surrounding towns, with no luck. At this point it would appear to be an unmarried or widowed woman that possibly moved to Medfield from elsewhere. The possibilities of undocumented events creates an almost infinite set of possibilities, as does the possibility it was misrecorded (i.e., the given name recorded wrong). If I was wildly speculating, I would note that the death is recorded in the town copy along with Thomas and Jonathan, two sons of Joseph Clark and Mary Allen, which might explain the lack of parents on Hannah's particular record, appearing as so much redundancy at the time it was written, but not now as we try to recreate what happened. Perhaps in the original the three deaths were connected to the parents with a bracket that was not transmitted into the town copy? The History of Medfield shows no Hannah in the family of Joseph and Mary, but also shows no children born between 1680-1685 to Joseph and Mary, so I might wonder if maybe this Hannah was an unrecorded daughter of Joseph and Mary, born about 1682-3, and killed by some contagious disease that hit the family in the winter of 1690 (all three deaths occurring in a one month span). Obviously she would not have survived long enough to get any mention in her father's will, if he had one, and with no gravestone or church records apparently being available, it is hard to check this. --Jrich 19:27, 8 January 2018 (UTC)