Mary Chesebrough Babcock

Biography

Mary Chesebrough’s life crossed from the Connecticut and Rhode Island shore country to an inland New York settlement. The New London town-record transcription places her birth in 1757, a daughter of Amos Chesebrough and Mary Christophers. She lost her mother in 1773. Three years later, on June 27, 1776, she married Gideon Babcock at Stonington, on Connecticut’s southeastern coast; he was then associated with South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

Their children were born over a quarter of a century. The family history lists Gideon, Amos, Richard, Mary, Henry, Asa, Nancy, Elizabeth, Frances, Abigail and Corrington. Most were born in Rhode Island. In 1799 the household moved to South Brookfield, in central New York, where Corrington was born in 1802. The move therefore came while Mary was still raising younger children, rather than after the family had grown.

Bereavement appears repeatedly in the family chronology. Nancy died young, Abigail died in 1799, and the genealogy records that sons Amos and Henry were lost at sea. It supplies no adequate chronology for the two drownings, so their place within Mary’s later years remains uncertain.

Gideon died in 1826. Mary remained a widow for roughly seventeen years, dying at South Brookfield on February 5, 1843 according to the family genealogy. Her recorded life encompasses a childhood in Stonington, marriage and a large family in Rhode Island, the migration to New York, and a long widowhood in the community where the family had settled.