Ezekiel Fearing

Ezekiel Fearing was born in Hingham on the 13th of March, 1787, and died on the 26th of April, 1865, in his seventy-ninth year. The 1893 History of Hingham enters him as the sixth generation of his line, Abel, James, John, Israel, and John before him, and gives him a single trade in quotation marks: “Blacksmith.” He kept his shop and his home on Main Street in South Hingham, the Liberty Plain stretch of road that the cemetery on the hill looks out upon.

On the 6th of February, 1811, he married Anna Cushing, a daughter of Robert and Judith (Loring) Cushing, born in Hingham in November of 1791. She outlived him by thirteen years and died in 1878, aged eighty-seven. They are buried here together.

What makes Ezekiel’s plain record matter is the house he filled. He and Anna raised seven children, and the marriages of his daughters knit his forge into the family the cemetery’s chapel remembers. His daughter Anna married Charles Whiting, the maker of edge-tools, in 1830; Sarah Gilkey married Albert Whiting, the master mason, in 1832; Olive Cushing married Benjamin S. Whiting; and the youngest of the four, Hannah Lincoln, married Amasa Whiting in 1844. Four daughters of one house, four Whiting men. The remaining two daughters carried other Liberty Plain names into their marriages: Mary Adams wed Isaiah G. Tower, and Deborah Jacob wed Justin Ripley, Jr. The last child, Henrietta, born in 1831, died before her fourth birthday.

So the blacksmith stands, in the genealogy, at the center of a web of neighbor marriages. The Whiting families whose stones cluster nearby were not strangers who happened to share a yard; they were the men who married into a smith’s house on the same road. Ezekiel’s own marker says little. The record around it shows a working man whose anvil sat at one end of a whole neighborhood of unions, and whose daughters carried the South Hingham names forward in pairs.

Family as recorded on Find a Grave

Abel Fearing1755–1794✓Olive Cushing Fearing1755–1819✓

Ezekiel Fearingm.Anna Cushing Fearing1791–1878✓also here

Sarah Gilkey Fearing Whiting1814–1894also hereMary Adams Fearing Tower1817–1838✓also hereOlive Cushing Fearing Whiting1819–1850✓also hereHannah Lincoln Fearing Whiting1825–1910✓also here

SiblingsSarah "Sally" Fearing Gilkey1779–1849 · Abel Fearing1784–1851 · John Fearing1792–1872

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