Ancestors

Lydia Bryant

Lydia Bryant was born on 23 October 1662, a daughter of Stephen Bryant the Plymouth immigrant and of Abigail Shaw. Savage's Bryant entry, compiled from the Plymouth Colony records, gives the birth, and the Churchill genealogy of 1904 gives her parents. Her age at death agrees with both.

She married William Churchill at Plymouth on 17 January 1683, a date that falls in 1684 by the modern calendar. His father had willed him his share of the town land at Punkatussett, and she went out with him to it. The town that grew on it was set off as Plympton in 1707. For a century afterwards the clerk identified half its Churchills by one phrase: a child of William, one of the first settlers in Plympton, and Lydia. The town book names her that way in at least six entries and never once gives her surname.

She had eight children that the record names: Isaac, Benjamin, Josiah, James, William, Lydia, Mehitable and Deacon Samuel. She gave her own name to a daughter, who married John Lovell on 8 November 1727. Two of her sons married two sisters out of the same Bryant household, which is a different Bryant family from her own. Samuel married Joanna Bryant and William married her sister Ruth, daughters of the John Bryant who died in 1736.

She was widowed in October 1722 and died on 6 February 1736 in her seventy fourth year, though her gravestone puts it ten days later than the town book does.

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Cite: Heirology, "Lydia Bryant (1662-1736)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lydia-bryant-1662-1736-d10204.