Ancestors

Bennet Taber Sr.

Bennet Taber was born at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on 23 July 1762. The town clerk wrote him down as "Bennet, s. John (s. Benj[ami]n) and Elizabeth". His mother was Elizabeth Bennet, a daughter of William Bennet, and his first name was her family's surname. She died young. By 1764 his father had married again, and Bennet grew up with a string of half-brothers and half-sisters.

In August 1780, at eighteen, he served six days as a private in Lieut. Nathaniel Pope's company of the Second Bristol County Regiment, called out on an alarm at Rhode Island.

Like his father, he was a blacksmith. On 4 August 1782 he married Mary Crossman at Dartmouth; the published banns call her Polly. He built a house in Fairhaven, the village on the east side of the river in the town of New Bedford. It stood on a small lot on the south side of South Street, three rods west of Middle Street. He bought the lot itself from Noah Allen on 28 January 1789, for twenty-five pounds seven shillings and sevenpence. Three weeks later, on 17 February 1789, he sold lot and house to Elkanah Hathaway, a cooper, for one hundred and twenty pounds. His wife Mary and his half-brothers Robert and Jeremiah Taber witnessed the deed.

On 23 October 1789 he sold his father, also a New Bedford blacksmith, his share of the real estate of his grandfather William Bennet, for ten pounds. He acknowledged that deed at Bristol the same day, and six days later he acknowledged the sale of the house. After that he vanishes from the Massachusetts records.

Two years later a Bennet Taber was in Kentucky. In late November 1791 the Kentucky Gazette at Lexington printed its list of letters waiting at the post office, and one was for "Bennet Taber, May's Lick". May's Lick was a new settlement in Mason County, founded in 1788. His son John C. Taber gave Kentucky as his birthplace, about 1795, in the censuses of 1850 and 1860. In April 1799 Simon Kenton and Col. William Ward led a party of Mason County families north across the Ohio River to the country between Springfield and Urbana.

The Dartmouth blacksmith and the Urbana settler are almost certainly one man, though no single record names both places. The Dartmouth man sold everything he owned in 1789 and left. A Bennet Taber was in Mason County by 1791, and the Urbana family had a son born in Kentucky about 1795. The name is unique in the Dartmouth records, both men had a wife named Mary, and the Urbana man's son Elisha was of age to marry in 1806.

Bennet Taber was among the settlers of Champaign County, Ohio, before 1805. In the winter of 1809-10 he joined the first Masonic lodge opened in Urbana. He stood surety on bonds for guardians and administrators, including his son Elisha's bond for the Britton orphans in 1809. By November 1818 he was a justice of the peace, taking acknowledgments of deeds. In January 1836 he and Mary sold a lot to the directors of an Urbana Township school district for twelve dollars, to build a school house on.

He made his will on 30 May 1837 and added a codicil on 2 June. His wife was to have half of his half of in-lot 117 in Urbana, the household goods and the livestock for her life. The other half of the lot went to "my dutiful son John C. Tabor", who also got fifty dollars for nursing him in his last illness. His money was to be put out at interest to support his wife. After her death it was to be divided among his children, and his daughter Elizabeth Baker was to have the use of her mother's share of the lot. He died that summer or early autumn. The will was proved at the October term of 1837.

The estate outlived its purpose. His son John, the executor, bought twelve hundred dollars of stock in the Bank of Urbana. The bank stopped paying in May 1841, and John took a quarter section in Logan County in exchange. The widow lived until January 1845. By then the land was all that was left, and it sold in 1847 for two hundred and eighty dollars. The heirs named in the court's papers were his sons Bennet Jr. and John C., his daughter Betsey Baker, and the families of his son Elisha, his daughter Mary Rhodes and his son Thomas, who had died.

Find a Grave records him at Oakdale Cemetery, Urbana, with the dates 23 July 1762 to October 1837. No stone is shown.

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Cite: Heirology, "Bennet Taber Sr. (1762-1837)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/bennet-taber-sr-1762-1837-eaa76e.