Thomas Bliss

Of Rehoboth. Made a freeman at Cambridge on 18 May 1642 and in Plymouth Colony on 4 Jan 1645. On 9 June 1645 he drew lot no. 30 on the Great Plain at Seekonk; in 1646 he was appointed “to view the fence of the town lots,” and in 1647 surveyor of highways (Bliss Genealogy, 1881).

His will (MD 8:85-86; Bliss Genealogy) left his house to his son Jonathan and also named a daughter married to Thomas Williams; “my Daughter Mary and her husband Nathaneell harmon,” of Braintree, who had “my three two yeare ould steers”; his son Nathaniel; and Nicholas Ide: “It I give unto Nathaneell the sonn of my sonninlaw Nicolas Ide my browne heifer.” The will does not name Nicholas Ide’s wife. Savage takes her to have been a Bliss daughter, and she was very probably Martha Ide (buried 1676), so Thomas Bliss was very probably Martha’s father (inference). In 1649 “son-in-law” could also mean a stepson, and the Bliss Genealogy suggested Nicholas might be a son of Bliss’s wife by an earlier husband; the will alone does not settle it.

He is not the Thomas Bliss of Hartford and Springfield from whom Ralph Waldo Emerson descends, so Mollie Pfeiffer’s claim of Emerson as a cousin through this family is wrong. The Bliss Genealogy’s suggestion that the two Thomases were cousins from Belstone, Devon, is unproven.

Open questions

• His wife and his English origin are not in the research.
• The 1648 Plymouth Colony petition said (WikiTree, unsourced) to show Nicholas Ide claiming a child’s share of his estate, or his estate papers, would settle whether Nicholas’s wife was his daughter.