Ancestors

Margaret Nash

Margaret Nash was born at Braintree in Massachusetts on 8 March 1683/4. The Braintree town register enters her as "Margaret daughter of Ffrancis Nash and Elizabeth his wife." Her father was a Braintree farmer who had mustered for the Narragansett campaign in 1675. She had an older sister Elizabeth and brothers Samuel, Thomas and John, and a brother whose name is torn from the page.

Her mother died while she was a child. In 1697 her father married the widow Mary (Purchase) Niles, whose husband Increase Niles had stood beside him in the Braintree file of Captain Johnson's company twenty two years before. Mary brought a son, John Niles, born in 1678. Two half-brothers followed, Benjamin in 1700 and James in 1703.

Margaret married John Niles, her stepbrother. The marriage itself is not in the Braintree register. Joseph W. Porter, writing up the Nash family in 1900, put it plainly: "She married her step-brother, John Niles of Braintree, Randolph part." When her father made his will in June 1713 he named "son-in-law John Niles and his wife Margaret." He died that August.

She appears in the Braintree records the way most women of her generation do, through her children: Daniel in 1712, Lydia in 1719, Peter in 1722, and a son Nathan. Porter says there were nine. The clerk who entered her son Daniel's birth wrote her "margreet."

In May 1751 a fever went through the Niles household. Her husband died on the 7th. She died on 10 May, three days after him. Their kinsman Ebenezer died on the 11th, their son Peter on the 14th and their kinswoman Mary Clark on the 17th. Porter and Find a Grave give the year as 1752. The town register gives 1751.

If Margaret Nash is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Margaret Nash (1683-1751)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margaret-nash-1683-1751-6b3bcf.