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Unless I am mistaken, the Jesse Brockway who married Abigail Gallup is the son of Abel Brockway and Elizabeth Wiley or Willey.
Abel's father Samuel Brockway was noted for marrying his first cousin, Margaret Smith, a union which unfortunately according to court records did not end happily.
"The image of the scold proved most useful to husbands saddled with wives who suffered from serious mental illness. Whereas seventeenth-century magistrates had posited distraction as a bar to divorce, the eighteenth-century bench could be swayed by a husband’s argument that his spouse’s irrational behavior stemmed from a deceitful and rebellious nature. The emblematic case for New Haven County was Samuel Brockway’s 1758 suit. The parties joined issue over whether Samuel deserved a divorce for his wife Margaret’s “heinous” adultery with a black man (which she did not deny, having given birth to a mulatto child) – or whether the divorce should be denied because of Samuel’s cruel treatment of Margaret and because she was “a poor Crazed Creature,” too
mentally disturbed to be held accountable for her actions.
Twenty-six neighbors and acquaintances of the Brockways lined up and took sides. On the one hand, eleven deposed that, ever since the couple moved into town, they had judged Margaret to be distracted and that Samuel himself had always esteemed her so, "while of late he says that she is possessed." A deacon, the son of a physician who spent much of his time "doctoring distracted persons," confirmed the seriousness of her illness. Another neighbor explained that Margaret did not have "the use of her Reason at least half of her time." Some neighbors added that they had seen clear signs of Samuel's beating his wife. One woman recounted that Margaret had recently run away, intending to kill herself, and had lain out under a fence all night, to be found the next day by a search party.
On the other hand, fifteen acquaintances testified as Samuel's witnesses. Some reported that Margaret "Generaly [appears] to Knew What she Does" and "will give a Rational answer." Others claimed to have observed that her fits and raving were "Deceit and Hypocrisy," occurring only in her husband's presence. Further, they described her as "very cross and Contrary to every Body," turbulent, and "of very bad behavior." Worst of all, she was "Rebelus" and "has Ben very unprofitable and Distructive" toward her husband, behavior that Deacon Moses Blackly believed sprang "not from a Liteheadedness but from a Spiteful Spirit."
The circumstances surrounding Margaret's liaison with Lot, the black man who lived in the Brockway household, are unclear. While some of the neighbors thought that Margaret had been raped, others understood that, immediately after having consensual sexual releations with Lot, she had told her husband, whereupon he had forgiven her and had continued to have sex with her (which, if true, should have barred a divorce on adultery grounds). Margaret herself gave conflicting accounts; sometimes she speculated that Samuel had bought the "Negro for that purpose"; sometimes she claimed that one night in a fit she had "prostituted her Body" to Lot; at other times she exclaimed that she would do it again with witnesses present so "that she Mite get rid of her Husband."
Repelled no doubt by Margaret Brockway's defiant attitude toward her adultery, the Superior Court magistrates, after a second hearing of the case, granted Samuel a divorce. The justices remained silent in the face of a recommendation from some of the Brockways' neighbors that Samuel be made to "give Bond for her maintenance." One wonders how poor Margaret Brockway, whether scold or madwoman, ended her days.
Whatever had occurred in the Brockway household, Samuel Brockway procured a divorce because he successfully portrayed his wife as a willfully disobedient woman whose quixotic and outrageous behavior was inexcusable. Faced with women who claimed to deserve a divorce or offered reasons (as did Margaret Brockway) to block a divorce, eighteenth-century judges sorted petitioning wives into two type: dutiful helpmeets and defiant shrews."
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