Ancestors

Lieut. Elisha Williams

Elisha Williams was born on 12 October 1727, the fifth child of William Williams and his wife Experience Wilson. The Newton town history of 1854 prints his birth in his father's family. Colonial Families of the United States, a compiled work of 1907, gives the same date and adds that he "settled in Vermont" and married Abigail Gurley.

His father was a housewright, a builder of houses, who was living at Watertown in 1737. In 1736 the father had joined two other men in buying a tract of 1,722 acres at Union, in the hill country of northeastern Connecticut. The family later settled at Mansfield, in the same corner of the colony.

On 20 September 1750 Elisha married Abigail Gurley at Mansfield. The church record enters it in one line: "Elisha Williams and Abigail Gurley." He was twenty two and she was nineteen. Her father, Samuel Gurley, was a farmer and a leading man of the town.

The couple made their home at Union. The town history of 1893 says of him: "Elisha Williams, probably a brother of the preceding, came to Union from Mansfield. He was a soldier in the old French war, and was called Lieut. Williams. He married Abigail, and had 8 children." The old French war was the French and Indian War of 1754 to 1763, the last of the colonial wars between the English and New France. The "preceding" man in that history is his elder brother William, who also lived at Union for some years.

In 1766 Elisha was one of the selectmen of Union. Selectmen were the small board that ran a New England town's business between town meetings. On 23 May of the same year an Abigail Williams was admitted to the Union church, probably his wife.

The Union town records name Elisha as the father of six children born there: Samuel, Daniel, Elisha, Stephen, Abigail and Elias. Samuel was born on 20 April 1756 and became chief judge of the Rutland County Court in Vermont. Elias, the youngest, was born on 27 February 1769. Two more of the eight children are not known.

In 1768 he went north to Clarendon, a town in what is now Rutland County, Vermont. Benning Wentworth, governor of New Hampshire, had chartered it in 1761, and in seven years nobody had settled it. That year Elkanah Cook, Randall Rice, Benjamin Johns, Samuel Place, Elisha Williams and the Walkers came up from Rhode Island and Connecticut. They chose their lots and went home again. In the spring of 1769 they came back with their families and made the permanent settlement. Cook, Place and Williams took the north part of the town, in the tract then called Socialborough. His son Elias was a few months old.

Elias's gravestone in Illinois names his brothers. Daniel and Elisha "died many years ago", the stone says, and seems to say they left no families. Samuel became one of the leading men of early Vermont and died in 1800 after an accident on his farm. Elias went west and died in Sangamon County, Illinois, in 1823. When and where Elisha himself died is not known.

If Lieut. Elisha Williams is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Lieut. Elisha Williams (b. 1727)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lieut-elisha-williams-1727-932325.