Ancestors

Mary Boynton

Mary Boynton was born on 19 July 1773 at Plymouth, in Windsor County, Vermont, and married Elias Williams of Clarendon, forty miles west across the spine of the Green Mountains. She bore ten children over roughly twenty-five years and gave birth to them in at least three states, in Vermont, in Essex County, New York, and probably in Ohio, while the household moved west by stages from Vermont to the Sangamon country of Illinois.

She is recorded, as women of her generation usually are, in one line of her husband's entry in a county history: her name, her birth date and her birthplace, supplied fifty years after the fact by children who had been born on the road. Her surname survives in the family in the ordinary way, as a son's middle name, Isiah Boynton Williams. The given name went with it: her eldest brother, born at Plymouth in October 1770, was Isaiah Boynton.

She outlived her husband by nearly twenty-seven years. Elias died in August 1823, eighteen months after the family reached Sangamon County, and she lived on among her children in Rochester township. In 1850 the census found her, as Mary Williams, seventy-six, born in Vermont, in the house of her son Isaiah B. Williams, with his wife Phoebe and five grandchildren.

Her death date is in conflict. The county history of 1876 gives 15 May 1850 and her memorial 12 May 1850, but the census taken that August still lists her. She is buried in the old graveyard at Mottarville Cemetery in Rochester, between her husband and her daughter Mary.

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Cite: Heirology, "Mary Boynton (1773-1850)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-boynton-1773-1850-9a8a58.