Charles Whiting
29 Mar 1808 – 16 Nov 1887 · Manufacturer of edge-tools
An edge-tool maker of Liberty Plain who married Anna Cushing Fearing, the eldest of Ezekiel Fearing's seven daughters, and one of four Whiting men who wed four of those daughters.
The stone is still there. View the burial record ↗
Charles Whiting was born in 1808, a son of Perez Whiting. The 1893 History of Hingham names him in the line Perez, Amasa, Daniel, and Samuel, back to James Whiton the immigrant, the book’s way of listing a man’s father and grandfathers in turn. He was a manufacturer of edge-tools, the axes, chisels, and blades a farming and shipbuilding town ran on, and he kept his house and shop at the corner of Main and Whiting Streets at Liberty Plain, the South Hingham stretch this cemetery faces.
On the 17th of October, 1830, he married Anna Cushing Fearing, the eldest of the seven daughters of the blacksmith Ezekiel Fearing and his wife Anna (Cushing) Fearing. The marriage was one of four that bound the two houses together. His brother Albert, the master mason, married Anna’s sister Sarah Gilkey Fearing; their first cousin Amasa Whiting married another sister, Hannah Lincoln Fearing; and Olive Cushing Fearing married Benjamin S. Whiting. Four Whiting men, four Fearing sisters, one road. Two families along Main Street became, in effect, one.
The marriage had its losses early. Charles and Anna’s eldest, Charles Davis Whiting, died in 1848 at seventeen and lies near them here. Their daughter Catherine Bowker married Dexter Groce in 1857, and their younger son, George Francis, had left Hingham by the time the genealogist came through. Charles himself died on the 16th of November, 1887, at seventy-nine. Anna outlived him by some two months, dying at Abington in January 1888, and was buried beside him.
It is the trade that tends to be forgotten first. Albert’s name survives on the chapel his son raised; Amasa kept the visible homestead. Charles made edge-tools, the working steel of the place, and the record of it is a single phrase in an old book and a stone in the ground. That phrase, and the web of Fearing marriages it sits inside, is most of what can now be said with confidence. The rest waits on the vital records, including the small question of whether he was born in March or in May.
Family as recorded on Find a Grave
Relationships are as recorded on Find a Grave.