Individual Details

Marriage

the marriage of Samuel and Mary Spencer, at Plymouth meeting-house, we find among the company who signed the certificate quite a number of notable and familiar figures. All the signers named Dawes were probably of Abraham's family.
Witnesses, Abraham and Edith Dawes, Robert and Richard Whitton, John Dawes, Wm. Spencer and 40 others.

The Whittons we are acquainted with : 'Robert, grandfather of the bridegroom, and Richard and Elizabeth, his uncle and aunt. The bridegroom's brother William we also know. A conspicuous figure in the meeting, no doubt, was the Welsh patriarch, Rowland Ellis, who was now in the closing years of his honored life, about seventy-four years old. He had come from Bryn Mawr in Wales, in 1686, and settled in Merlon, but in 1720 had removed to Plymouth. (He died in 1729 at Gwynedd at the house of his son-in-law, John Evans.) Another prominent person (one of the two signing by this name) was John Cadwalader, of Horsham, a preacher of note, who died in 1742 on the island of Tortola in the West Indies, and was buried
there side by side with his traveling companion, John Estaugh. And still another preacher in the company was William Trotter, of Plymouth, youngest of the three. He was now but twentyeight years old, but he had " appeared in the ministry " at the age of twenty-one. If all the ministers spoke on this occasion he at least probably did not long detain the company, for his memorial says his ministry " was not tedious or burdensome." Then there were William Coulston, a well-known early settler of Whitemarsh, and Thomas Palmer, a large landholder in Horsham,—a neighbor of Samuel Spencer, who had rode over to see his young friend married. Another witness was Sarah Hank, the wife of John Hank, of Whitemarsh, She was the sister of John Evans, of Gwynedd, and probably was the great-grandmother (or thereabout) of the mother of Abraham Lincoln. William Harmer was Abraham Dawes's neighbor in Whitemarsh, a large landholder. And there were a dozen or so Welsh neighbors from Plymouth and Gwynedd—the Owens, the Jones's, the Thomas's, the Merediths, the Lloyds, the Davies's, the Evans's, and others,—most of them lately enough come from their native hills to be still full of reminiscences of life in Wales.