Nicholas Ide

Nicholas Ide came from England and was of Rehoboth by 1643 (Savage 2:517). His wife Martha was very probably a daughter of Thomas Bliss, whose will of 1649 leaves a heifer to "Nathaneell the sonn of my sonninlaw Nicolas Ide" (MD 8:85-86). Nathaniel was probably their first child, born on 11 Nov 1647. The rest, as the Rehoboth records have them (p. 649): Mary 1649; John 1652; Nicholas, Nov 1654; Martha 1656; Elizabeth, Apr 6, 1658; Timothy, Oct 1660; Dorothy 1662; Patience 1664; Experience 1665. Mary married Samuel Fuller on 17 Apr 1673, and Martha married Samuel Walker on 11 Nov 1681.

King Philip's War. His son John went to the war, and probably his son Nicholas too. Rehoboth's lists of its soldiers name "John Ide" among "Those engaged in the Narraganset expedition" of December 1675 and "Nicholas Ide" among "Those who served under Major Bradford" in the summer of 1676 (Bliss, History of Rehoboth, p. 117; Soldiers in King Philip's War, p. 463), Nicholas the son then 21. On 28 Mar 1676, two days after Pierce's Fight, "a party of the Indians, crossing the river, laid the town in ashes, burning forty houses and thirty barns" (Bliss p. 95).

Death followed the burning. His son-in-law Samuel Fuller, Mary's husband, was buried "the 15th of August, 1676"; "The wife of Nicholas Iyde buried the third of November, 1676"; and "IYDE John, the middle of December, 1676" (Vital Record of Rehoboth, p. 900). They were among some twenty Rehoboth burials between late May and December, none of them said to be slain, perhaps of a sickness in the burned town. At the courts of 7 June and 3 July 1677 administration of "the estate of Samuell Fuller, of Rehoboth, deceased" went to Robert Fuller, "Nicholas Iyde, Senir" and Mary Fuller (Records of the Colony of New Plymouth 5:234, 237). Long afterwards, in 1733, his son Timothy claimed John's soldier's right among the Rehoboth grantees of Narragansett Township No. 4: "John Ide ... Timothy, brother" (Bodge p. 427).

On 16 Mar 1679/80, at Medfield, he probably married Jane (Damon) Plimpton, widow of John Plimpton. He was buried at Rehoboth on 18 Oct 1690, and Jane married George Kenrick the next April.

Mollie Pfeiffer's typescript gives him a wife Mary Bliss, and Ralph Waldo Emerson for a cousin; but his wife was Martha, and Emerson's Blisses were another family, of Hartford and Springfield. Benjamin Ide Wheeler perhaps descends from him: Wheeler's mother was Mary Eliza Ide, daughter of Ebenezer Ide of the Attleborough and Rehoboth Ides, and Nicholas is the only colonial Ide progenitor there.

Open questions

• The first child, born 11 Nov 1647: the page image of the Rehoboth VR, whose text seems to read "IDE Nathaniel, of Nicholas."
• The 1648 Plymouth Colony petition in which, as WikiTree has it, he claimed a child's share of Thomas Bliss's estate.