Ancestors

Joseph Towne

1661-1717 · Topsfield MA
Born 1661, Topsfield, Massachusetts
Died 1717
Father: Edmund Towne
Mother: Mary Browning
Children include Nathaniel

Joseph Towne was born at Topsfield on 2 September 1661, the fifth of Edmund Towne's ten children, and he was thirty when the witchcraft came through the town and took two of his father's sisters. He was not accused and neither was anyone in his household, which in Topsfield in 1692 was a piece of luck rather than a distinction.

He married Amy Smith on 13 March 1687, when he was twenty five and she eighteen. His first cousin Jacob had married her elder sister Phebe four years earlier, so two Smith sisters carried the name into two branches of the same family within a decade.

Eight children are recorded to them, running from Benjamin in 1691 to Amos in 1709, and the fifth of them was Nathaniel, born on 1 June 1700, who married Jemima Perkins at Topsfield in 1723. The Topsfield town book enters that birth and names both parents.

He died in 1717, aged fifty six. His widow outlived him by thirty nine years.

Sources

Edwin Eugene Towne, The Descendants of William Towne, who came to America on or about 1630 and settled in Salem, Mass. (1901)
Vital Records of Topsfield, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (1903)

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Cite: Heirology, "Joseph Towne (1661-1717)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joseph-towne-1661-1717-ef8447.