Ancestors

Hannah Webster

Hannah Webster was born on 20 October 1748 at Southington in Connecticut, then a parish of the town of Farmington, and was baptised there. She was the third child of Aaron Webster and his wife Lydia. Her father was made lieutenant of the Southington trainband in 1761 and was remembered in the parish for throwing a stone over the steeple of the old church. Her elder sister Lydia married Amos Root. After her came Abiel, Robert, Aaron, Jerusha, Elisha, a brother Daniel who died on the day he was baptised, and Sarah, the youngest, who married Daniel Barnes.

In December 1769 she married Jared Harrison of Wolcott, the parish just west of Southington. The Connecticut marriages index gives the day as 27 December, and the Webster family genealogy of 1915 gives 21 December. Her husband was chosen one of the choristers of the new Farmingbury society, the parish that became Wolcott, at its first meeting in November 1770, and by 1772 he sang bass.

Five of her children were baptised at Wolcott: Daniel Webster on 25 March 1777, Roswell and Benjamin together on 25 May 1777, John on 11 January 1778, and Ruth on 18 June 1780. The eldest was given her own surname as his middle name. The marriage was seven years before the first of those baptisms, and children born earlier may have been baptised at Southington, before the Farmingbury church existed.

Her father died at Southington on 21 March 1783. On 7 December 1785 she and her husband signed, with her mother, two of her brothers and her sister Sarah and Sarah's husband, a receipt to her brother Robert, the administrator, for their shares of the estate. She signed as Hannah Harrison. The receipt is the record that makes her Aaron Webster's daughter, and not only a Hannah Webster of the right age.

The family moved to Watertown in Connecticut, where her husband was elected deacon of the church in 1801, and then to Whitestown in Oneida County, New York. He died there on 21 January 1810 in his sixty first year. Whether she was living then, and where she died, is not known.

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Cite: Heirology, "Hannah Webster (b. 1748)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/hannah-webster-1748-1a6ffd.