Nathaniel Brown (1683 - 1735)

Born 18 Sep 1683 in Middletown, Middlesex County, Connecticut

Ancestors

Husband of Sarah (Bacon) Brown — married 17 Jun 1708 in Middletown, Connecticut

Descendants

Died 7 May 1735 at age 51 in Middletown, Middlesex County, Connecticut

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Biography

A copy of Nathaniel's will is found at A Digest of the Early Connecticut Probate Records: Hartford district, 1729-1750 (edited by Charles William Manwaring), pp. 144-145. Nathaniel requested that his daughter Sarah, and her husband George Beckwith name a son after him (which they did). Brown's lands are described there. But the will was "secreted" until 1775.

In a 1998 article in the Hartford Courant entitled "Colonial Era Wills Took Pragmatic And Sentimental Look At Heirs," DIANA ROSS MCCAIN wrote as follows:

"Bequests often reveal an individual's urgent desire to be remembered after death, as in the case of Mary Southmayd's monogrammed silver pieces and the directions Nathaniel Brown of Middletown made as to how his weapons were to be disposed of. Brown had only his wife and a married daughter to consider when he made out his will on Sept. 20, 1731. But the 48-year-old Brown yearned for a male heir to carry on his name, and his wife had reached the age when he could no longer hope that she would bear him a son. Consequently, he directed in his will that ``if my daughter Sarah Beckwith should have a son and they call him after my name, that child should receive Brown's ``gun and sword and ammunition.

Sarah Brown Beckwith bore her first child, a son, in 1733, while her father Nathaniel Brown was still alive, but the baby was named George after his father. A second son, born the year after his grandfather's death in 1735, was named Barzillai. But when a third, and, it turned out, final son arrived, Sarah Brown Beckwith and her husband named him Nathaniel Brown Beckwith.

Nathaniel Brown Beckwith may very well have taken the weapons bequeathed to him by his namesake grandfather when he marched off to fight in the American Revolution. He was killed in the war, apparently without leaving any sons of his own, according to the 1891 genealogy The Beckwiths by Paul Beckwith.

But the name of Nathaniel Brown was carried on by his descendants as he had so fervently wished for at least another generation, for Nathaniel Brown Beckwith's older brother Barzillai Beckwith named a son born in 1781, probably after the death of his uncle in the war, Nathaniel Brown Beckwith."

The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Volume 15, New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1861, at p. 162, quotes Nathaniel Brown's and his wife Sarah's headstones, at states that Nathaniel was the son of Nathaniel Brown and Martha Huse.

There are references elsewhere to BROWN, Nathaniel (1654-1712) & Martha HUGHES/HUSE (1655-1729).

Find A Grave Memorial# 28610987 (i.e., Nathaniel Brown Sr.) states: "Nathaniel Brown Jr. b. July 15, 1654 in Middletown, CT, died May 9, 1712 in Middletown, CT Married to Martha Hughes, born 1655 in Guilford, CT. She was the daughter of Richard and Mary Hughes"

Sources

Find A Grave Memorial# 21279979.

• A Digest of the Early Connecticut Probate Records: Hartford district, 1729-1750

edited by Charles William Manwaring, at pp. 144-146

See also Brown and Bacon epitaphs here.