Will of Deacon Thomas Low of Ipswich

Abstracts in Goldthwaite, Boardman Genealogy (1895), p. 120, and the Hammatt Papers, p. 216.

He calls himself “of good understanding & sound memory, but ancient, crazey & infirm in body.” For his wife Martha: “a horse to ride on as she may have occasion, 10 bushels apples for the winter … two barrels of ‘cydar.’” Names his children Jonathan, Samuel, David, Martha Dodge, Joanna Dodge, Sarah Low and Abigail Goodhue.

Crowell (History of Essex, p. 120) quotes its opening, “I Thomas Low, of Ipswich, in the county of Essex, in the Massachusetts Bay, Maltster,” and summarizes the widow’s provisions: the use of “the new end” of the house, “two hundred weight of pork yearly, with ten barrels of Winter apples, and all the Summer fruit she needed, two barrels of cider, six bushels of malt, three of Indian corn, and one of wheat … fourteen pounds of wool and twelve of flax, wood for one fire, the milk of two cows, and a horse to ride at her pleasure.” The “ten barrels” against Goldthwaite’s “10 bushels” of apples is a difference between the summaries.