Mary Corliss

1646 - 1722  (76 years)

• Name	Mary Corliss  [1, 2]
  Birth	8 Sep 1646	Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts   [3, 4, 5]
  Gender	Female
  Death	22 Oct 1722	Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts   [3, 4, 5]
  Person ID	I17417	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of BJS
  Last Modified	22 Nov 2018

  
  

  Father	George Corliss,   b. Abt 1617, Devon, England d. 19 Oct 1686, Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts (Age ~ 69 years)
  Mother	Joanna Davis,   b. Abt 1625, Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire, England d. Bef 12 Jan 1693, Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts (Age ~ 68 years)
  Marriage	26 Oct 1645	Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts   [4, 5, 6, 7, 8]
  Family ID	F10698	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	William Neff,   b. Between 1639 and 1642   d. 7 Feb 1689, Pemaquid, Maine (Age ~ 50 years)
  Marriage	23 Jan 1665	Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts   [4, 5]
  Children	+ 1. Mary Neff,   b. 9 Nov 1668, Haverhill, Essex, Massachusetts d. Aft 1725, Plainfield, Windham, Connecticut (Age > 58 years)
  Family ID	F10696	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	4 Oct 2017

  
  

• Notes

  From Wikipedia: During King William's War, Hannah [Duston], her husband Thomas, and their eight children were residents of Haverhill, Massachusetts. In March 1697, the town was attacked by a group of Abenaki from Quebec. In the attack, 27 colonists were killed, and 13 were taken captive to be either adopted or held as hostages for the French. When their farm was attacked, Thomas fled with eight children, but Hannah and her nurse, Mary Neff (nee Corliss), were captured and forced to march into the wilderness, Hannah carrying her newborn daughter, Martha. According to the account Hannah gave to Cotton Mather, along the way her captors killed the six-day-old Martha by smashing her head against a tree. Hannah and Mary were assigned to a family group of 12 persons and taken north. The group included Samuel Lennardson, a 14-year-old captured in Worcester, Massachusetts, the year before. Six weeks later, at an island in the Merrimack River at the mouth of the Contoocook River, near what is now Penacook, New Hampshire, Hannah led Mary and Samuel in a revolt. Hannah used a tomahawk to attack the sleeping captors, killing one of the two grown men (Lennardson killed the second), two adult women, and six children. One severely wounded Abenaki woman and a young boy managed to escape the attack. The former captives immediately left in a canoe, but not before taking scalps from the dead as proof of the incident and to collect a bounty. They traveled downriver, only during the night, and after several days reached Haverhill. The Massachusetts General Court later gave them a reward for killing their captors; Hannah Duston received 25 pounds, and Neff and Lennardson split another 25 pounds (various accounts say 50 or 25 pounds, and some accounts mention only Duston's receiving an award). The event became well known, due in part to Cotton Mather's account in Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702). Duston became more famous in the 19th century as her story was retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau.

  
  

• Sources

  [S2268] Button Families of America by R. Glen Nye; edited by Katherine Watson Nye. 1971. [S660] Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire by Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis. Portland, Maine: Southworth Press, 1928-1939. [S1912] Vital Records of Haverhill, Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849. Topsfield, Massachusetts: Topsfield Historical Society, 1910. [S2270] The Descendants of William Neff Who Married Mary Corliss, January 23, 1665, Haverhill, Massachusetts by Dorothy Neff Curry. 1958. [S2318] The Ancestry of Samuel Blanchard Ordway by Dean Crawford Smith; edited by Melinde Lutz Sanborn. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1990. [S101] The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, Volumes 1-3 and The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volumes 1-7, by Robert Charles Anderson. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1996-2011. [S1125] Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts by William Richard Cutter. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1908. [S1964] A Genealogical Record of the Corliss Family of America by Augustus W. Corliss. Yarmouth, Maine: 1875.