Ancestors

Abigail Ford

Abigail Ford was baptised at Bridport in Dorset on 8 October 1619. Her father was Thomas Ford. Her mother was Elizabeth Charde, the widow of a Bridport joiner named Aaron Cooke, who had married Thomas Ford there in 1616. Abigail was the second of their five children. Her elder sister Joan had been baptised in 1617. Through her mother she had an older half-brother, Aaron Cooke, born in 1614.

When she was small the family moved to Dorchester, the county town, where her sister Hephzibah was born in 1625 and two other children died as infants. In 1630, at ten, she crossed in the Mary and John with her parents, her half-brother Aaron, her father's daughter by his first marriage and her sisters. The family settled at Dorchester in Massachusetts and in 1636 moved to Windsor on the Connecticut River.

She married John Strong as his second wife. The first wife he had brought from England had died soon after the landing. Jacobus dates the marriage about 1635, the Strong genealogy about 1635 or 1636, and Savage perhaps 1638. She was about sixteen. Her eldest recorded son, Jedediah, was born at Windsor on 7 May 1637. The family genealogy credits the couple with fifteen or sixteen children. Her mother died at Windsor in April 1643.

About 1660 she and her husband settled at Northampton on the Connecticut River, where he served as the first ruling elder of the church for close to forty years. Her father came there in old age and died in 1676. The bronze plaque on the family's memorial boulder in the Bridge Street Cemetery, put up in 1928, gives her death as 1688. Her husband died in 1699, when about a hundred and fifty descendants were said to be living around them.

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Cite: Heirology, "Abigail Ford (1619-1688)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/abigail-ford-1619-1688-9cb957.