Ancestors

Tabitha Harvey

Tabitha Harvey was born at Norton, Massachusetts, on 5 October 1742. The date comes from the Keene town record of her family. Her parents were Josiah Harvey and Dorcas Woodward, who had married at Taunton in 1737 and were living at Norton by the 1740s.

In September 1763, when she was twenty, she was a witness in a case before the Bristol County Court of General Sessions. Abner Williams of Taunton, a minor, was charged with "Endeavouring a rape on the body of Tabitha Harvey". She was still a minor in law, so her father gave the bond for her appearance as a witness. The court record names her father.

She married Ephraim Wetherell Jr. at Norton on 21 January 1766. She was twenty three and he was twenty. Their first daughter, Rhoda, was born that August. Over the next eighteen years she bore eight children, at Norton, Easton, Taunton, Westmoreland and Keene, as the family moved north into New Hampshire. She named a son Josiah.

The last years at Keene were hard ones. Her daughter Tabitha, not yet five, was killed by a rolling log on 5 May 1784, two months after the birth of Lydia, according to a family Bible record. Her husband died in September 1785, leaving debts larger than the estate. The administrator's account allowed her a payment for taking care of her two youngest children for seventy seven weeks. Those were probably Asaph, then four, and Lydia, then a baby.

She died in May 1798, according to later family compilations. The place is not recorded.

If Tabitha Harvey is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Tabitha Harvey (1742-1798)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/tabitha-harvey-1742-1798-ade7de.