Sarah Burt

Sarah was a daughter of Jonathan Burt of Springfield and his first wife, Elizabeth Lobdell of Boston: "Sarah, b. September 4, 1656, m. Benjamin Dorchester and later Luke Hitchcock" (The First Century of the History of Springfield, 2:540). Her father's sister Abigail Burt was the mother of John, James and Nathaniel Munn, her first cousins (Burt 2:538-539, 612).

King Philip's War. On 22 April 1675, at eighteen, Sarah married Benjamin Dorchester. Her father was a selectman, town clerk and deacon of Springfield. On the night of 4 Oct 1675, warned of the attack, he took refuge with the town's older men in its three fortified houses, and when the town had burned he set the losses at "twenty-nine houses and barns." Chosen a selectman the next February, he "entered a brief account in the third volume of the town records," the only account of the burning preserved in Springfield (Burt 1:129-131, 134). Benjamin Dorchester died on 24 May 1676, five days after the Falls Fight, and on 14 Feb 1676/7 Sarah married Luke Hitchcock, who had ridden in it (The Genealogy of the Hitchcock Family, pp. 407-408).

They had eleven children, born between 1678 and 1698, two of whom died as infants (pp. 408-409), among them Capt. Ebenezer Hitchcock. Luke died in January 1726/7; his will left her the use of half his house and meadow "so long as she bear his name." She outlived him by nearly twenty years and died on 9 Nov 1746, "in ye 91 year of her age" (p. 408).

Research: King Philip's War: the Connecticut valley, the Colony of Connecticut, Long Island and New Paltz; Patricia Hatten's Browne–Chapin side: the pedigree, notable ancestors and famous kin.

Open questions

• What Benjamin Dorchester died of on 24 May 1676, and whether they had a child.
• Where she was born and died, probably Springfield.