Priscilla Dawes

d. 1668 · Boston MA → Watertown MA → Billerica MA

Died 1668

Children include Mary

Priscilla Dawes was the wife of John Rogers of Watertown and Billerica, married in 1640, and the mother of the Mary Rogers who married John French. Hazen gives her as Priscilla Dawes, of Boston, and that is the only thing said about where she came from. Her parents are not known.

A church record made in her lifetime gives her maiden name, her marriage and her move in one line: Priscilla Dawes, now wife of John Rogers, was dismissed from the first Church in Boston to Watertown, 22 November 1640. A dismissal was a transfer of membership granted to a member in good standing. So she belonged to the Boston church before she married, and carried her standing with her.

She was married at Boston or thereabouts in 1640, a year after her husband was made freeman at Watertown. The first three children at least were born there, beginning with John in September 1641 and Mary on 26 October 1643.

About 1656 the household moved north to the new plantation at Shawshin, by then named Billerica, where her husband took up twenty three acres by the Concord river. She had been keeping house in a settled town for sixteen years. Billerica was a year old, with sixty odd families and no mill, and the grant had to specify the highway along the brook because there was not yet a road. She went with children of fifteen, thirteen and younger.

She bore at least ten children: John, Mary, Thomas, Abigail, Daniel, Nathaniel, Priscilla, Bethia and Sarah, and a Frances named only in her sister Abigail's will. She died on 21 April 1668. Her husband remarried fifteen months later, to the Boston widow Elizabeth Brown, and outlived her by nearly eighteen years. Her sons John and Thomas, and Thomas's eldest son, were killed in the raid on Billerica of 1695. Her name survives in her great-granddaughter Priscilla Shed, born in 1705 to Nathan Shed and Mary French.

Children

Mary Rogers 1643-1677

Sources

Rev. Henry A. Hazen, History of Billerica, Massachusetts, with a Genealogical Register (Boston, 1883), scan historyofbilleri00haze at archive.org, Rogers genealogical register number 1

Henry Bond, Genealogies of the Families and Descendants of the Early Settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts (1855), scan familymemorialsg00bond at archive.org, Rogers and the addenda

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Cite: Heirology, "Priscilla Dawes (d. 1668)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/priscilla-dawes-1668-04fa7d.