Sarah Slater

Wife of Richard Ellingwood, cooper of Boston, married 5 January 1766 (record); very probably the “Mrs. Sarah Ellingwood approbated to retail in Cross Street” in 1782 (record). As “Sarah Ellingwood of Boston Widow” she administered Richard’s estate on 5 November 1784, and two days later married Isaac Downes. In January 1790, as “Sarah, the wife of Isaac Downs, the Mother of said deceased”, she took a third of her son Joseph’s estate, signing by mark (record).

Open questions

• Her parents. The Ancestry tree gives her a birth on 25 Aug 1744 at Boston and a mother Susanna Mulberry, with no record; they are not used. The Mulberry ancestry is disproven: Susanna Mulberry (b. Boston 1725/6, daughter of Benjamin and Ann Mulbery) married Malachy Salter, the Halifax merchant, in 1744 (“Malachi Salter & Susanna Mulberry,” Boston Marriages) and died at Halifax in 1794, aged 68; “Salter” was read as “Slater,” and no Sarah is among the Salter children. The tree’s death “19 Feb 1794, Halifax” is Mrs. Salter’s, and the grandparents it gives, Capt. Benjamin Mulberry and Anne Everton, are the Salters’ ancestry, not this family’s (research/ellingwood/Ellingwood_Woodbury_Rand.md). Boston candidates for her parents: James Slater and Elisabeth Odiorne (married 1735), Claus Slater and Sarah Russell (married 1739/40), or Peter Slater and Abigail Bradford (1741-51). A lead: “Asa Stodder & Mary Slatter” were married by Rev. Samuel Stillman on 24 Nov 1765, six weeks before Sarah’s own marriage; Asa Stoddard, bricklayer, was surety on her administration bond in 1784, and Stillman married her to Isaac Downes two days later. Mary was possibly her sister.