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Peter Blackmore = Sarah Edwards (2)


SAMUEL BLACKMORE = ?

B: Rochester MA 20 Jul 1712
M: ?
D: ?

siblings: Mary, Susannah and 9 half siblings

Samuel Blackmer

Conjecture: This Samuel returned to ?Dorchester? with his mother after his father's death (1717), and she sheltered among Edwardses (and might have remarried?). We find Samuel being baptized (as -mer) in Hampton CT on 10 Sept 1739 (in the midst of Jonathan Edwards' Great Awakening), and apparently going (back --it's only about 15 miles south) to Norwich in 1748, where he joined a Separatist church.

There is a 1735 will of one Mary Lee for which Samuel Blackmer of Norwich is named as kinsman and executor (with Sarah Giddings). IS it likely that a 23-year-old Samuel would have had this role? Mary Lee seems to be kin to Sarah Lee (wife of Richard Lee), who was probably sister to Samuel Edwards, whose daughter Sarah Edwards married Peter Blackmore.

Samuel is a real weak link, since so little seems to be known about him: no marriage data, no death data, nothing clear about other children. Almost reason enough to make a trip to Norwich and environs.

Can't tell the players without a scorecard. This is pretty murky, and FHB's pages of notes are exceedingly dense. Just what was happening in SE New England in the first third of the 1700s might shed some light.

Further study of the FHB notes suggests this scenario: some of Sarah Edwards' kin had moved from Ipswich to Norwich CT in the early 1700s, and there produced a large batch of children in the same generation as Samuel#2 (Sarah Giddings was one of this generation). Sarah Edwards may have traveled with her children to Norwich, and Peter#2 may have married one of his Edwards cousins (name wouldn't necessarily be Edwards, of course). It seems that CT was booming from about 1715 to the late 1730s, and attracting quite a bit of immigration from MA.

It looks like FHB combed documents in that part of CT pretty carefully, since he notes "no mention of Blackmer" in several places he looked. Just what WAS eastern CT all about in 1715-1740? By midcentury it was exporting people to VT and (after 1760) Nova Scotia, presumably as niches filled up and large families couldn't be accomodated on limited agricultural resources. Robert J. Taylor's Colonial Connecticut: a history (KTO Press 1979) gives a general sketch, but doesn't have much to say about Norwich or Bolton.