The Whitings of Hingham

Albert Whiting

23 Feb 1810 – 23 Sep 1891 · Master mason and builder

A master mason and builder of Liberty Plain, married into the Fearings; the memorial chapel that still stands in this cemetery was raised by his son in his memory.

The stone is still there. View the burial record ↗

Albert Whiting was born in Boston on the 23rd of February, 1810, the son of Perez Whiting, and came to be one of the builders of South Hingham, a master mason and contractor whose work stood up around the village he lived in. The 1893 History of Hingham records him on Main Street at Liberty Plain, the same road where the Fearing family kept its house and forge.

On the 24th of October, 1832, he married Sarah Gilkey Fearing, a daughter of the blacksmith Ezekiel Fearing and Anna Cushing Fearing. His was one of three such marriages in a single generation: his brother Charles married Sarah’s sister Anna, and his first cousin Amasa Whiting married a third sister, Hannah Lincoln Fearing. Two families along one street became, in effect, one.

Albert and Sarah’s children carried the line forward and, in one case, cut it short: a son who lived only three years in the 1830s; their daughter Sarah Henrietta, who married into the Caryls; and their eldest, Albert Turner Whiting. It was Albert Turner who, in 1905, raised the stone Whiting Memorial Chapel that still stands inside this cemetery, built in memory of his parents, Albert and Sarah Fearing Whiting. The chapel is the most visible thing the family left here; the man it remembers is in the ground a short way off, and most visitors never connect the two. That connection, name, stone, and the people behind both, is the whole of what this walk is for.

Family as recorded on Find a Grave

Perez Southard Whiting1775–1860Mary Bowker Whiting1782–1823
Albert Whitingm.Sarah Gilkey Fearing Whiting1814–1894 (m. 1832)also here
Albert Turner Whiting1833–1909also hereGeorge Franklin Whiting1837–1840also hereSarah Henrietta Whiting Caryl1849–1929also hereGeorge Whiting1857–1947also here

SiblingsMary Whiting Gardner1802–1832 · George Whiting1806–1823 · Winslow Lewis Whiting1813–1872

Relationships are as recorded on Find a Grave. A ✓ marks a tie the 1893 History of Hingham independently confirms.

What we don't yet know
  • The 1893 History records his birth at Boston in 1810; his death year, 1891, comes from his Find a Grave memorial and is not yet checked against a primary record.