This Lamson family stone stands in the Harvard Square graveyard in memory of Elizabeth (Muzzey) Hovey, the very young wife of John Hovey, a schoolteacher. Elizabeth was the daughter of John Muzzey of Lexington. The couple married in 1727, two years after John's graduation from Harvard.
John and Elizabeth Hovey married very young for 18th-century New Englanders (she was 17, he was 20). In Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer aggregated the marriage ages for 17th-century New Englanders from several town studies and put the average age of marriage at 26 for men and at 23 for women. My own research on women born in Boston in the year 1739 indicates that their mean age at marriage was 23.6 (median and mode 23, only 18% were 18 or younger). In some cases, early marriage followed pregnancy, though I have no evidence that that was the case here. John Hovey's entry in The Hovey Book does not mention any children born to John and Elizabeth (though pregnancy is still a possibility).
Elizabeth Hovey, Cambridge, MA, 1729
3 comments:
You know, I've never really thought much about the quarries. Now that I think about it, there are some very distinctive stones — I'm thinking of some of the Malden stones that are almost black with streaks of red (iron?).
Good idea. I'll look around for this.
Look at how similar the carving is on this stone!
http://www.heatherbygrace.com/Site/My_Albums/Pages/Mattituck_Headstones.html#46
Yep, that's a classic Lamson workshop stone from Charlestown, MA.
You will find stones from the big New England shops (Lamson in Charlestown, Stevens in Newport, Foster in Dorchester) up and down the east coast as far away as South Carolina. It was relatively easy to transport gravestones by water, but cumbersome to do so by land, so you may see more Lamson stones in Long Island than in Springfield, MA.
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