Mary Noyes Eaton

Biography

Mary Noyes became a widow while still seventeen. She was born on January 18, 1809 to Isaac Chamberlain Noyes and Mary Gibbs, a birth included in the family register of Temple, in western Maine near Farmington. Maine was then a district of Massachusetts. She grew up between two older brothers and two younger sisters. The account dates her mother’s death to 1817, when Mary was eight.

She married Jeremiah Eaton, and their daughter Mary Blackwell, later Mary Blackwell Eaton Russell, was born at Temple on June 1, 1826. Jeremiah died on November 28, less than six months later. The town-record transcription gives both events, establishing the short interval between the child’s birth and her father’s death. It leaves unanswered how Mary supported herself and her infant afterward.

A cemetery memorial carrying her full parentage identifies her with the Mary who married Thomas Adams at Temple on December 4, 1828. It also gives her earlier marriage to Jeremiah as August 18, 1825. This later household is a probable identification.

The accepted family chronology places her death in 1900. The matching memorial specifies April 2 at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, with burial at Hillside Cemetery in Townsend, Massachusetts.