Temperance Hinckley

Biography

Temperance Hinckley was born in 1748, identified in the family reconstruction as a daughter of Ebenezer Hinckley and Mehitable Sturgis. She married Timothy Phinney at Barnstable, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, in 1767. In that reconstruction, their daughter Mehitable Sturgis carried the name of Temperance’s mother into the next generation and later married Otis Carpenter.

The family remained connected with Barnstable while children grew up and formed households elsewhere. Among them were a son named Timothy and daughter Mehitable. A cemetery transcription preserves the death of another child, Calvin, on August 13, 1793, aged five months, and explicitly names Timothy and Temperance as his parents.

Temperance's marriage lasted about fifty-eight years. During it, Timothy served in military and civil roles and became known as a church deacon. Their daughter Mehitable had meanwhile established her own large household with Otis Carpenter at Rehoboth and Seekonk, near today’s Massachusetts–Rhode Island border.

She died on November 27, 1825, aged seventy-seven. The published family chronologies place Timothy's death thirteen years later, in 1838.