Abigail Bass
Abigail Bass was baptized at the First Church of Braintree, Massachusetts, on 3 October 1697. The church record reads "Jonathan, Abigail, children of Samuel & Mary Bass". Her father, Samuel Bass, was a cooper and later a deacon. Her mother was his second wife, Mary Adams. Family writers have called Abigail and Jonathan twins; the record shows only that they were baptized on the same day.
Her father's mother was Ruth Alden, a daughter of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower. On her mother's side she belonged to the Adams family of Braintree.
Her mother died on 9 March 1706, when Abigail was eight. That October her father married Bethiah Nightingale at Boston. A half-sister, Bathsheba, was baptized in March 1712.
The family worshipped at the South Church of Braintree, the church of the town's middle precinct. A precinct was a part of a town set off to support its own church and minister. Samuel Niles was settled as its minister in 1711, and he listed the members in full communion, those admitted to the Lord's Supper. Her father was one of the two deacons. The women's list ends "Widow Thayre, Sarah Thayre, Abigaill Bass". She was about thirteen and a half.
She married John Wild Jr., the son of John and Sarah Wild of the same church. No record of the marriage has been found. It is not in Niles's own list of the couples he married from 1711 to 1721, not in the Braintree town records and not among the Boston marriages. It took place by the spring of 1714, because their first child was baptized in March 1715.
No record written after her marriage calls her a Bass. The identification rests on the church records, and it is probable rather than proved. Her first child was baptized as the daughter of "John Wild Junr" in March 1715, five months before John himself joined the church. That baptism rested on the mother's membership. Niles recorded no admission of any Abigail Wild between 1711 and 1730. The likeliest reading is that she had joined under her maiden name. The only young Abigail on the 1711 roll is Abigaill Bass. Her children's names point the same way. She named a daughter Mary, her mother's name, and a daughter Bathsheba, the name of her half-sister.
The Mayflower Society accepts the line. Its genealogy of John Alden's descendants lists her among Samuel Bass's children and marries her to John Wild, and state societies have admitted members through her. That book cites no marriage record either.
John and Abigail Wild had four children at Braintree. Abigail was baptized on 27 March 1715, John was born on 18 March 1719, Mary on 22 July 1721, and Bathsheba was baptized on 23 August 1724. Their son John died in March 1721, eleven days after his second birthday.
By February 1727 the family was living at Norton, in Bristol County. A second son named John was born there on 13 February 1727. In 1730 the Norton church received "John and Abigail Wild from the South Church of Braintree". Her last child, Samuel, was born at Norton on 28 June 1732.
She died before 25 October 1744, when her husband married Silence Clap at Norton. Her death and burial are not in the Norton records.
Her daughter Abigail married Benjamin Skinner at Norton in 1731 and died in 1780. Mary married Jacob Leonard of Taunton in 1737 and Seth Clark in 1744. Bathsheba married Ephraim Wetherell in 1742. Her son John became a physician, married Anna Hodges in 1746 and died in 1756, in his thirtieth year. Samuel married Lydia Wetherell in 1750 and, after her death, Marcy Pratt of Taunton.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Abigail Bass (b. 1697)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/abigail-bass-1697-8e67be.