Gideon Holbrook

“Holbrook G., 2d, Monument Ponds, seaman” in the Plymouth directory of 1846. In 1850 at Plymouth with Lucretia, their son Gideon H. (9 months) and Lucretia’s mother Lucy Bartlett. He died at Plymouth on 30 Nov 1852, aged 33, of “Chagres fever,” the malaria or yellow fever caught crossing the Isthmus of Panama by the Chagres River, the usual gold-rush route to and from California; the record does not say he made the crossing. He died intestate, and in December 1853 David Clark of Plymouth, at the request of “the widow and heir at law,” was made administrator of “Gideon Holbrook 2nd… late of Plymouth, Mariner.”

In 1842 his mother, as executrix of his father’s will, sold him land for $40 (estate papers). A deed of 30 Nov 1861 describes his share of his father’s land as in “Manomet village so called,” bounded by “the highway leading past the house of Ezra Clark and the meeting house” and by “the dower lands of the widow of the late Gideon Holbrook,” his mother Nancy (deed).

His son Gideon H. Holbrook (b. 28 Nov 1849) died on 19 Sep 1853 of dysentery, aged 3y 11m, and is buried beside him at Manomet. The town birth index names Gideon H.’s mother “Pamelia,” probably a misreading; the census and the burial row point to Lucretia.

Not to be confused with his cousin Gideon Holbrook (1786-1868), son of Capt. Eliphalet, or with that Gideon’s son Gideon, who married Victorine Annette Simmons in 1840.