William Nye and his wife Ruth Snow represent one family on which I have a lot more to accomplish—mostly because of confusion deciphering vital records of people with the same names and quite a bit of conflicting information.
I descend from William and Ruth’s son William who married Nancy Snow. William and Nancy’s daughter Aurilla West Nye married Josiah Benson and they are my great-great-great grandparents from Plymouth that I wrote about here.
I have at times been overwhelmed with the how far back my grandfather Arthur Washburn Davis’s ancestry goes in New England. I started researching his family later than that of other family and have found 11 Mayflower passengers and many more old New England families. Many of the folks were in places like Rochester and Wareham, where there seems to be a lack of records compared to other Massachusetts towns where I’ve done research.
A cousin also researching the family told me William Nye was the son of (yet another) William Nye and Abigail Pope of Sandwich and that he was born June 1765 in Sandwich, which is also stated in a 1907 Nye genealogy, but that would make him too young to be “my” William, so I'm thinking it's incorrect.
William’s wife Ruth Snow was the daughter of David and Phebe ( _____ ) Snow and was born 25 March 1768 in Rochester. There is a David Snow that married a Phebe Stetson in Rochester in January 1776, too late to be the right David and Phebe.
The Nye family came from Sandwich and was among the early settlers in Rochester, in the Charles Neck and lower Marion areas. Originally Rochester’s large land area included the western shore of Buzzards Bay as far as Wareham and Dartmouth, and the present towns of Mattapoisett, Marion, Rochester, and parts of Wareham.