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Benjamin Haskoll's
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Hannah was a widow for about 6 years before she married Josiah Ober and moved to Wenham. She had three children and he had four or five. They had four children of their own, although one died as a baby. The First Church of Wenham has a record of the wife of Josiah Ober dying in July 1796, and process of elimination makes it very likely to have been Hannah.1 She is probably buried in the old cemetery in that town, although neither she or Josiah, who died the next year, have gravestones.
Hannah married Benjamin two weeks before her father died. In the inventory of his estate, there is an enormous and dubious sum of £95, 15 shillings, 6 pence spent on "sundry goods" for Hannah.2 In the division of his estate, Hannah's portion was primarily the £25 spent "at her marriage in household goods that were purchased for her before the decease of her father." The large discrepancy begs the suggestion that the inventory should have said £25 rather than £95, but it was never corrected. There is no division mentioned of the personal estate or its value to confirm if the original sum figured in the inventory was accurate. In 1771, she and her sisters, as designated in their mother's will, were to share in the division of her numerous and relatively high quality clothes.3 The real estate, which was a woodlot in Manchester, was given to their brother Andrew and he was to pay each of his sisters £16, 4 shillings and 6 pence. Hannah wasn't given a seventh part of her mother's entire estate. This likely means her mother already gave her that value in money before 1760, when she wrote her will, maybe while Hannah was a widow with her three very young children. However, her son Benjamin Haskell was given one of the sevenths of the estate for no obvious reason.
children of Hannah Marsters and Benjamin Haskoll:4
i. Nathaniel b. 29 June 1740
ii. Benjamin b. 1 May 1742
iii. Joseph b. 15 April 1744
children of Hannah Marsters and Josiah Ober:5
iv. Samuel b. 21 March 1753
v. Ruth b. 21 March 1753, d. 13 February 1754
vi. Ruth b. 7 October 1754
vii. Elizabeth b. 15 December 1757
vital records sources: Her birth and first marriage are in Vital Records of Manchester, Massachusetts, to the end of the year 1849 (Essex Institute:1903), pp. 89, 196. Her second marriage is from Vital Records of Wenham, Massachusetts, to the end of the year 1849 (Essex Institute:1904), p. 149. She was likely the Mrs. Josiah Ober recorded in the Wenham vital records, p. 214, as dying in July 1796, taken from a First Church record.
1. Vital Records of Wenham, Massachusetts, to the end of the year 1849 (Essex Institute:1904), 213.
2. Essex County Probate case file 17834.
3. Ibid, 17829.
4. Vital Records of Manchester, Massachusetts, to the end of the year 1849 (Essex Institute:1903), 56-8.
5. Vital Records of Wenham, Massachusetts, to the end of the year 1849 (Essex Institute:1904), 64.