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Everybody seems to "know" that John Bigelow married Sarah Bemis in 1694, after his first wife died. However, as far as I can tell, the only authority for this assertion is Bond's history of Watertown, which states further that the Sarah Bemis in question was the daughter of Joseph Bemis of Watertown. The funny thing is that Joseph Bemis also had a wife named Sarah, who was a marriageable widow in 1694 (Joseph having died in 1684). Now, the Watertown records contain no marriages at all from mid-1692 to mid-1695, so the normal method of verifying the marriage doesn't work here. If we suppose that Bond found some documentation giving the names and the date of the marriage, we are immediately faced with the tough question: how could Bond know whether Sarah was the widow of Joseph Bemis, or the daughter? As far as I can tell, there is no evidence at all that the daughter lived past infancy, aside from Bond's assertion that she was the one who married John Bigelow. More to the point, we know from John's will of 1702/3 that his second wife had property of her own before the marriage, but we also know from Bond's article (and corrections) on the Bemis family that the estate of Joseph Bemis was left in the hands of his widow and not divided up until she was dead, in 1712, so that any unmarried Bemis daughter would have been penniless in 1694, while Joseph's widow Sarah Bemis had considerable property at that time. Needless to say, when the Bemis estate was divided in 1712, there was no share for daughter Sarah, meaning that she was dead by then. There is no record of the death of a Sarah Bemis or a Sarah Bigelow in Watertown (or in Weston) at any time from 1643 (when the daughter was born) through 1712 (when both mother and daughter had to be dead).
My question, then, is what was the basis for Bond's statements? Does anybody know?
-- John Chandler
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