| Notes |
- Regarding the identity of the mother of this John Bent: was it the first wife of his father John Bent (1636-1717), Hannah Stone, or his second wife, Martha Rice?
Alicia Crane Williams's entry for John Stone (1618-1683), the father of his father's first wife, Hannah Stone, in the Early New England Families Study Project, says of Hannah that she was born 6 Jun 1640, and died between 9 Jun 1683 and about 1691, "between when Hannah Bent participated in the deed by heirs of John Stone and the estimated year of birth of youngest child, David, who died at age 39 in 1730." After Hannah's death, her husband John Bent (1637-1717) married Martha Rice; Williams places this second marriage as taking place "aft. abt. 1691."
The evidence Williams cites for placing those particular bounds around the death of Hannah (Stone) Bent is Allen Bent's 1894 NEHGR article "The Bent Family" (volume 48, page 288) and his subsequent 1900 book The Bent Family in America (citation details below), both of which say that John Bent (1637-1717) was twice married, first on 1 Jul 1658 to Hannah Stone, then (no date given) to Martha Rice, and that he had three children, all by his first wife Hannah Stone: Hannah, born 6 May 1661; John, born 29 Nov 1689, and David, born about 1691, a date no doubt estimated based, as Williams says, on the fact that David died in 1720 and was said at the time to be 29.
But given the dates of these three children's births, and the fact that all we actually know about the death date of Hannah Stone is that she was alive on 9 Jun 1683, Allen Bent's assignment of all three children to Hannah seems...unlikely! A man is married twice, to a first wife in 1658, and then to a second wife at an unspecified date. And he has three children, one born in 1661, one born twenty-eight years later, and a third born two years after that. Which is likelier? That his first wife suddenly bore two further children after a break of nearly three decades? Or that the second two children are by the second wife, and that the first wife died sometime not at all long after 9 Jun 1683, rather than after 1691?
Finally, the record of the birth of the younger John Bent, as found in the published vital records of Sudbury, quoting Middlesex County records at East Cambridge, clear gives his parents as John and Martha. "BENT, John, s. John and Martha, Nov. 29, 1689" (italics ours). This seems a reasonably clear indication that John Bent was a son of his father's second wife. (And if this was the case, then his younger brother David must have been as well.)
(It seems notable that James Savage in his 1860-64 Genealogical Dictionary of New England, volume 1, page 169, says that John Bent was born "prob. by sec. w. Martha, d. of Matthew Rice". And it seems also relevant that Clarence Almon Torrey's listing for the marriage of John Bent to Martha Rice dates it as taking place "by 1689", despite the fact that several of Torrey's listed sources assert otherwise. Conceivably both Savage and Torrey were perfectly well aware of the entry for the younger John Bent's birth in the vital records of Sudbury.)
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1689 - 1759 (69 years)
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