The Children of Two John Balls of Watertown

Bond confuses three John Balls who lived in Watertown. Warren, in his far more recent work, seems to pretty much use Bond's data without checking, and so even though he indicates some awareness that others don't follow Bond, he can't really find the problem. In fact, he rather fatalistically says, "I cannot see how it affects a Ball Genealogy as to which was the mother of whom." Not helpful.

Bond actually makes two mistakes, one of omission, and one of commission. First, he never shows any awareness of the birth of Mary Ball to John and Mary Ball on 22 Feb 1732/33. Second, in his abstract of the will of John-44, he adds the name of a son Daniel, which amazingly, is never mentioned in the will, and is likewise never mentioned in the list of children provided by the widow. One may speculate on how these errors came about (probably not to the benefit of Bond's reputation), but needless to say, it is impossible to figure things out without fixing those errors.

Bond intermixes facts about three John Balls:

• John-12, whom he gives a second wife named Mary, who is really the 2nd of 3 wives of John-44. Bond might have recognized this if he hadn't missed the birth of Mary, because then he might have realized the John and Mary having a daughter was not a 64 year old man and his second wife.
• John-37, who is the son of John-12, is given all the children born to John and Mary, even though some of them belong to John-44. Bond might have realized this if he hadn't missed the birth of Mary, because it is too close to the birth of twins Daniel and Hannah, showing there were two couples named John and Mary, and that more care allocating the children was needed.
• John-44 is shown losing his first wife in 1728 and then waiting 11 years before he remarries Lydia Perry. Common sense suggests he may have had an intermediate wife. Indeed it is the Mary who was mistakenly identified as the second wife of John-12, and we are thus able to find the births of all the children named in the will of John-44 (which Bond has a hard time recognizing as his will, because there are so many children Bond cannot account for).
• As a small benefit, Bond's list of unknown Balls includes a Mary Ball who married Samuel Child. The addition of the missed birth of Mary now lets us identify who she was.

We can pretty much take John-12 out of the picture. He was born in 1668, had a wife Bethiah, for whom there seems to be no death record, so no reason to think he remarried. His last known child, John-37, is born in 1704, and all the questionable births we are dealing with are about 30 years after that birth, when he is 64 or more and unlikely to be having children. I presume Bond thought the Mary who d. 1738 was the wife of this John because the death occurred in Waltham, where this John (but also the other two John) lived at the time. This John d. 1752 age 85, and seems to have no probate file.

The other two Johns left wills. John-44 left a will in Worcester in 1756, which Bond mis-abstracted. It available online here. John-37 left a will in Waltham in 1769. It is available at americanancestors.org (membership required?) It was reconciling these wills that exposed the problem with Bond. I have not searched for other treatments of the family than the ones cited, so am unaware if this is addressed in some other article, etc.

The following table attempts to explain how the children were allocated to parents. All the events come from the published vital records of Watertown, Weston, Waltham and Worcester. Since location is not really a factor it was left off to simplify the table, but the records will be cited appropriately on the pages of the respective children. Many are unambiguous, such as those where Abigail (John-44's first wife), Lydia (John-44's third wife), or Anna (John-37's second wife) are named. It is mostly the overlapping period where both men had wives named Mary that is the problem.

--Jrich 03:59, 15 April 2015 (UTC)