I recently went searching through newspaper records for information about the family of John Doane of Eastham for the next Early New England Families (ENEF) sketch. Newspaper resources about 17^th- and 18^th-century families are rare, but do exist for larger cities such as Boston. I happened upon the following abstract from the Boston New-Letter:

“Doane, Hannah, w[ife]. John, d[aughter] Capt. Joshua Hobart of Hingham, (twice a wid[ow]. when she m. Doane), at Eastham, apoplexy, Sept. 4, 1731.”¹

Um. I had the marriage of Hannah Hobart to John Doane, all right, but two more husbands?

Previously, I had investigated Hannah (Hobart) Doane when writing the ENEF sketch for her father, Joshua Hobart.² There, I had identified her sole husband as John Doane. Backtracking now, I found the entries in Clarence Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700³ for John Doane who married Hannah (Hobart) Snell, and for Samuel Snell who married Hannah Hubbard.

Hannah Hubbard/Hobart of Hingham married Samuel Snell of Piscataqua sometime after a bond was filed in Boston on 12 January 1687. Hingham vital records include the birth of a child Hannah, daughter of Samuel Snell, on 28 March 1689[/90], and her death on 14 September 1690. Samuel Snell, “late of Boston, mariner,” died in Boston by October 1690, when his widow Hannah petitioned for administration of his estate. One of the co-signers of Hannah’s administrator’s bond was Edward Cowell, husband of Hannah’s sister Sarah Hobart—both of whom were daughters of Joshua Hobart.

One lost husband found, one to go.

If Hannah (Hobart) Snell married someone between Samuel Snell and John Doane, it had to have been between 8 November 1690, when Hannah Snell was awarded administration on Samuel Snell’s estate, and 5 March 169[5/]6, when Joshua Doane, son of John and wife Hannah, was born. A global search through Torrey’s Marriages produced no viable Hannah Snell who married before 1700. No marriage records for John Doane, Jr., to anyone, including Hannah Snell, were found.

Hannah Hobart’s father, Joshua Hobart, died before her first marriage. In June 1685, her mother, as Hellen Hobart, deeded property to “Loving and Obedient Child Hannah Hobart of Hingham,…in Consideration of her marriage approaching”—which would have been the one to Samuel Snell, although the intended groom was not named in the deed. The next step in this journey will be to search probate records, etc., of Hannah Hobart’s siblings to see if they might have mentioned their sister during her brief third marriage.

I must accept that I have spent a bit too much time fiddling around with “other spouses of daughters-in-law” to warrant delaying the ENEF sketch for John Doane, Jr., any longer. I will also update the online version of the Joshua Hobart sketch with what I have found. Should I turn up more information, the online sketches for both Hobart and Doane will be appropriately updated.⁴

Notes

1 Ancestry.com, “U.S. Newspaper Extractions from the Northeast, 1704-1930, vol. 2, Deaths outside Boston,” 310. Hannah’s husband, John Doane “3 ^rd” (1664-1755) was son of John Doane, Jr. (ca. 1635-1708), subject of the in-progress ENEF sketch.

2 Early Families of New England (Original Online Database: AmericanAncestors.org, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Alicia Crane Williams, Lead Genealogist), Joshua Hobart; Alicia Crane Williams,Early New England Families 1641-1700, Volume I (Boston: 2015, errata et corrigenda 2021), 217-33.

3 Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700, 3 vols. (Boston: 2011) Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700. (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. NEHGS, 2008)

4 When ENEF sketches in the American Ancestors database are updated, a “version” number and year are added to the headers, e.g. V.2 (2022). Headers without any version numbers are all Version 1.