Ancestors

John Wild

John Wild was born at Braintree, Massachusetts, on 30 October 1691, the eldest son of John Wild and his wife Sarah Hayden. The town clerk's first entry reads "John wild the son of John Wild by Sarah his wife was born the 30th day of October 1691". A later recopy in the town book reads 29 October 1692, which cannot be right beside his brother Samuel's birth in March 1693. His own ages agree with 1691. His will of November 1765 says he was then in his seventy-fourth year, and his gravestone puts him in his eighty-fifth year in March 1776.

He grew up in the South Church of Braintree, the church of the town's middle precinct. His mother was a member by 1711. He married Abigail, the daughter of Deacon Samuel Bass of the same church, by the spring of 1714. No record of the marriage has been found, and her maiden name is probable rather than proved.

Their first child, Abigail, was baptized on 27 March 1715 as the daughter of "John Wild Junr". He himself was admitted to full communion that August. His father joined separately in 1718 as "John Wild Senr", and those two words are how the church book tells them apart until his father's death in 1732.

A son John was born on 18 March 1719 and died on 29 March 1721. A daughter Mary was born four months later, on 22 July. On 23 August 1724 the minister, Samuel Niles, baptized "Bathsheba Wild Daughter of John Wild".

By February 1727 the family had moved south to Norton, in Bristol County. A second son named John was born there on 13 February 1727, and a son Samuel on 28 June 1732. In 1730 John and Abigail were received into the Norton church by letter from the South Church of Braintree. His father was buried at Braintree in October 1732, having left him ten pounds and a confirmation of what he had already been given.

Abigail died before the autumn of 1744. On 25 October 1744 he married Silence Clap at Norton.

He farmed at Norton for fifty years. His land ran beside that of Capt. Samuel Clap, Capt. Simeon Wetherell and Jonathan Leonard, and he owned a lot in the Taunton Great Cedar Swamp that he had bought of David Lincoln. In 1761, as "John Wild of Norton ... Yeoman", he sued Jacob Galush, a Norton cordwainer, on a note of one pound fifteen shillings and eightpence that Galush had given him in February 1757.

His son John became a physician. He married Anna Hodges in 1746 and died on 13 December 1756, in his thirtieth year, leaving a son Benjamin. His daughter Abigail married Benjamin Skinner, Mary married Jacob Leonard of Taunton and then Seth Clark, and Bathsheba married Ephraim Wetherell.

He made his will on 1 November 1765 and added a codicil on 12 April 1769. He named his three daughters in both, and his will is the record that proves them his. He died at Norton on 7 March 1776, in his eighty-fifth year. Six days later, on 13 March 1776, his will was proved at Norton before George Leonard, judge of probate for Bristol County.

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Cite: Heirology, "John Wild (1691-1776)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-wild-1691-1776-001de4.