Bethiah Carpenter

Biography

Bethiah Carpenter had already been married and widowed when she married Obadiah Carpenter on December 12, 1728. Her first husband was Benjamin Lyon. The second marriage established a large household at Attleborough, in southeastern Massachusetts near the Rhode Island border, where Obadiah farmed and served as a church deacon.

Their daughter Bethiah was born in 1729. Over the following nineteen years the family grew to include Nehemiah, Sybil, Huldah, Deliverance, Hannah, Obadiah, Daniel, Lucy and Ezra. The cemetery material records Ezra's death in 1750, while the older children were beginning to marry.

Obadiah died in January 1764. Bethiah then went to live with her son Nehemiah at Foxborough, farther inland in Massachusetts, according to the Carpenter genealogy. Nehemiah's household became the setting of her later life, and she remained there until her death on January 15, 1788. She had outlived her second husband by twenty-four years.

Her burial was with Obadiah in the old Attleborough cemetery. The record of the move to her son's home gives Bethiah's later years a location beyond the phrase “widow of”: after raising her children at Attleborough, she spent her old age in one of the households they had established.