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ePiLoGUe Mehetabel’s children, like their mother before them, lived long, eventful lives. John, perhaps, experienced the most personal misfortune, but he also displayed an ability to try to move beyond his troubles. in the single year after his father’s death, he lost his twenty-five-year-old son John, who drowned after being knocked into the sea by his ship’s boom, as well as his twenty-three-year-old son richard and his wife Grace, both of whom appear to have been taken by the “Longfever.” (his twenty-eight-year-old son Joseph would fall victim to the same ailment in 1756.)1 John’s trials must have precipitated some soul-searching, as he joined the new London church a little over a month after Grace’s death. he remarried in 1748, and he and his second wife, hannah, had three children together, one of whom they named Mehetabel. although John served as new London’s town clerk in 1758 and seems to have continued to run the family shipyard for several years, by about 1760 he had decided to start a new life in newport. Some time after his move, his niece Lydia Coit hubbard (Joseph’s daughter, who was married to Martha’s son William) expressed in a letter to her parents her wish that John might “spend the remainder of his days with that ease and Comfort which i believe he has bin a stranger to for some time.”2 The date of John’s death is unclear, although a 1774 letter written by his brother Joseph noting that John and hannah were visiting from newport indicates that he lived at least into his late seventies. The fate of Mingo, whom John had inherited after his father’s death, is also unknown.3 Mehetabel’s son Joseph remained active well into his later years, fathering the last of the nine children he had with his wife Lydia when he was nearly sixty. Joseph became a patriot in the years leading up to the american revolution, joining new London’s nonimportation committee opposing the townshend acts, which taxed paper, paint, glass, and tea. although by 1775 189 Epilogue 190 business interests and family connections brought Joseph to norwich, Connecticut , he continued to maintain residential and retail property in new London until much of it was destroyed in General benedict arnold’s 1781 burning of the town. Joseph lived to an even older age than his mother had, dying in 1787 at the age of eighty-eight. Martha’s life seems to have been a comfortable one. She remained financially secure even after Thomas Greene’s death in 1763, and, according to her descendants, she was “beloved and honored” by her extended family. around the time of the revolution, Martha also apparently moved to norwich , where some of her children as well as her brother Joseph lived. in 1782, at the age of seventy-six, she bought a home there that she then deeded to her son russell, who, like Joseph, had lost property in arnold’s new London assault . Unfortunately, Martha did not leave behind any personal papers, and a comment made in 1765 by her son William that “it is really got to be a great task for Mother to write a letter” suggests that, as she grew older, Martha no longer took the same pleasure in writing she once had.4 Martha specified in her will that her considerable estate of almost eight thousand pounds be equally divided among her six living children—to “share & share alike”—and requested that “handsome” silver tankards be purchased from the estate for seven of her grandchildren. at the time of her death in 1784, she was buried in the Greene family vault in the trinity Church crypt. after trinity was destroyed in the Great boston Fire of 1872, the church moved from Summer Street to its current landmark location in Copley Square, and its graves were transferred to a single plot in Cambridge’s Mount auburn Cemetery. Martha’s remains, and those of all the other relocated trinity parishioners, are marked there by a simple memorial stone.5 Little is known about the fate of Mehetabel’s beloved granddaughter Lize, other than that she remained in new London for the rest of her life. She died in october 1772, just shy of her fifty-first birthday. Mehetabel’s heirs continued to live in the family home, located near the present corner of new London’s Coit and...

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