Abigail Woods (1726-1786) was daughter to (7GGP) Samuel
Woods III of Groton, Middlesex County, and Patience
Bigelow. It is through the New England pioneer ancestry of
Samuel’s mother (8GM) Hannah Farwell that we’re
descended from the Plantagenets and
therefore, in common with a goodly fraction of the inhabitants
of Western Europe) from the alarmingly-prolific
Charlemagne.
(6G) Grandpa Oliver I clearly
prospered in Acton: Grandma Abigail’s stone is large
and elegantly tooled in early post-Puritan style. Has to have cost
him a bundle.
Oliver lived 18 years as Abigail’s widower.
Her epitaph expresses a lot
more of a classical memento-mori Puritan attitude than does
his. The winged human face
surmounting her stone catches in flight a transition from the
Puritan winged death’s head to the 19th-century urns and
willows on Oliver’s.
I’m trying to learn whether the face on the stone was
intended as Abigail’s likeness. Some folks did that, at
substantial cost. Were it so, it would say something more about
the Wheelers’ social and financial standing.
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