Lydia Bates
Lydia's maiden name is not known. Bates was the name of her first husband, Edward Bates of Boston. He had come to Boston on the ship Griffin on 4 September 1633, as an apprentice to Thomas Leverett, an alderman of Boston in Lincolnshire. He was admitted a freeman in 1637 and was later disarmed as a follower of the Wheelwright party, the dissenters around the Rev. John Wheelwright in the Antinomian controversy. He died between 1641 and 1645. Their son John Bates was born in 1642.
On 7 November 1645, at Concord, she married William Fletcher, whose first wife Rachel had died. The Concord register enters it as "William ffletcher and Lidia Bats". William had a son, Joshua, not yet two, and she raised him with her own children. Her daughter Lydia was born at Concord on 30 March 1647.
In 1653 they moved to the new town of Chelmsford, where the first town meeting was held in their house in November 1654. On 1 February 1656/7 William had his children baptised there, and her son John Bates, about fifteen, with them. The Chelmsford register names her once more, as the mother of a daughter: "Easter, d. William and Lideah, Apr. 12, 1664."
Her daughter Lydia married the Rev. John Fiske, the town's first minister. In 1668 her stepson Joshua married the maid of the minister's house after a court case.
Her husband died in November 1677. She died at Chelmsford, his widow, on 12 October 1704. Her son John Bates lived at Chelmsford until 1722. A suggestion that she was born a Fairbanks, baptised at Boston in Lincolnshire in 1622, is only a suggestion.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Lydia Bates (d. 1704)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lydia-bates-1704-08beb5.