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Events of importance are at Living in Black Mountain NC
My own life and my opinions are shared at When I was 69.

REMEMBER: In North America, the month of September 1752 was exceptionally short, skipping 11 days, when the Gregorian Calendar was adapted from the old Julian one, which didn't have leap year days.

Thursday, March 7, 2019

Happy birthday Elizabeth Hawley Booth Abt.1618-1689

Author's Introduction: I'm spending a lot of time looking at the Booth Family of early Connecticut colony. Sometimes I may interrupt this series to look at other ancestors, but I am very interested in getting some more information about my mother's family roots.
 
Her birthday is also celebrated March 5, but I've got someone else's birthday already posted then.  So I don't think my 9 times great grandmother will mind a day or so either way.

She was mentioned in my blog for Richard Booth, who is listed on ancestry as having the same birth date and death date as his wife Elizabeth Hawley Booth.  I think it's more likely that someone in the Church of Later Day Saints (Mormons they have asked to be called) listed their ancestors with fabricated birth and death dates.  And since the LDS runs (?) the Ancestry site, I can't very well complain.  They do a fabulous job of providing all of us some good programs which serve to collect information about ancestors.

She supposedly was born in Parwich Derbeyshire England.  But we don't really know her dates, nor who her parents were.  She at some point immigrated to the American colonies. Whether it was before or after her marriage to Richard Booth, is not known.  Some descendants give her a marriage date of 1640 in Fairfield County, CT. 

 

Their 7 children included one who died before her first year.  And Ancestry is listing 2 of the children as having same birth and death dates...as I mentioned in Richard's post yesterday. (I'm going to spend some time looking at new information about the siblings.)**

Joseph was the son who became my great times 8 grandfather.  His family marker is quite large in the Congregational Cemetery in Stratford, CT.


As I look at her children's dates, (listed on ancestry) there are additional children added to Elizabeth Hawley Booth and Richard's family.  And it was already stretching things for Elizabeth (the mother) to have had her last child when age 51.  Now there's one who would have been born in her 53rd year.

Sorry folks, these are unrealistic.  It is far more likely that her own birth was not in 1607.  Let's agree that her marriage to Richard was in 1640.  She was unlikely to have been 33.  It's much more likely that she was in her early 20s.  So I'll say about 22 years old.  Just shifting that to a probable birthday in 1618 means she was only 42 at the time of her last daughter's birth.

It's a shift for me to arbitrarily make.  But the people who listed her birthday as exactly the same date and year as her husband's and exactly the same death date made their guesses based on what they knew at the time.  And the many times that these dates have been copied since someone guessed them doesn't make them any more a fact than the one I am suggesting.

Now I see how cumbersome it is to write about the children on the same post, and that I need to split this post up into more than one posting...so next I'll be sharing about some of the Booth children.

** I found out and will share tomorrow, that the 2 sons didn't have the same birth dates after all!












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