Samuel Whiting

Born	1702-09-06 Billerica, MA
Died	1772-11-04 Billerica, MA
Select Board
In Office	1745 - 1747
Deacon of the First Parish
In Office	1749 - 1772
Father	Oliver Whiting

Samuel Whiting was born in Billerica on September 6, 1702, the son of Oliver Whiting and Anna (Danforth) Whiting and a grandson of the Rev. Samuel Whiting, the town's first minister. His father was a representative, town clerk, selectman and justice of the peace, "an active and useful citizen," as Henry Hazen put it, and died on December 22, 1736. Of his sisters, Dorcas married Deacon Joshua Abbott and Anna married William Stickney.

On May 8, 1729 he married Deborah Hill, daughter of Deacon Samuel Hill and sister of Ralph Hill. Their children were Samuel (1730), Timothy (1731/2), Deborah (1733, died 1749), Anna (1736), who married Hezekiah Crosby, Martha (1738, died 1742), Benjamin (1740, died the same month), Achsah (1741), who married John Phelps of Lancaster, Zilpah (1743) and David (1745), who lived only a few weeks. Deborah died on September 5, 1745.

He was a selectman in 1745 and 1746. By the time he married his second wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Winchester, on November 2, 1749, he was Deacon Samuel Whiting, and he served as a deacon of the church for the rest of his life; the tax list of 1755 rates "Deacon Saml." Whiting on the east side of the town.

Deacon Whiting died on November 4, 1772, "in 71st y." His son Samuel, a cordwainer, had died in 1769; that Samuel's son, Samuel Whiting, became a deacon in his turn and held the office for more than forty years. His son Timothy moved to Lancaster, served in the French war in 1755, and with two of his sons took part in the fight at Concord and Lexington; one of them, John Whiting, became an officer of the Continental line and later colonel of the 5th Infantry, and died at Washington in 1810.

Samuel Whiting

Samuel Whiting

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