John Homer Bliss, Genealogy of the Bliss Family in America (1881)

Compiled genealogy, read in the archive.org full text. For Thomas Bliss of Rehoboth (d. 1649) it gives: freeman at Cambridge 18 May 1642 and in Plymouth Colony 4 Jan 1645; lot no. 30 on the Great Plain at Seekonk, drawn 9 June 1645; appointed in 1646 “to view the fence of the town lots” and in 1647 surveyor of highways; his will of 8 June 1649 and inventory of £117 16s 4d (citing NEHGR 4:282). The will left his house to his son Jonathan and named a daughter married to Thomas Williams, his daughter Mary, wife of Nathaniel Harmon of Braintree, his son Nathaniel, and his “sonninlaw” Nicholas Ide. It notes that “son-in-law” could then mean a stepson, and that Nicholas Ide might have been a son of Bliss’s wife by an earlier husband rather than the husband of a daughter.

It also traces Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Bliss descent: Rev. Daniel Bliss of Concord was a son of Thomas Bliss and Hannah Cadwell of Springfield, grandson of Samuel Bliss and Mary Leonard, and great-grandson of Thomas and Margaret Bliss of Hartford. That is a different Thomas Bliss; the book’s claim that the two Thomases were cousins from Belstone, Devon, is unproven.