Josiah Rogers II

Born	1786-09-26 Billerica, MA
Died	1866-12-21
Select Board
In Office	1821 - 1824 1831 - 1833
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1831 - 1831
Preceded by	Zadok Howe
Succeeded by	Zadok Howe
Father	Josiah Rogers
Mother	Rhoda Wooster
Spouses	Mehitable Blanchard (m. 1815-04-04 ) Lucy Bancroft
Children	Sarah

Josiah Rogers II (1786 to 1866), called Josiah Rogers Jr. in the town records of his time, was a Billerica selectman in the 1820s and 1830s and one of the town's two representatives to the General Court in 1831. He was born on September 26, 1786, the eldest son of Josiah Rogers and Rhoda (Wooster) Rogers of Tewksbury, who had married the previous December. His father was himself a selectman at intervals from 1799 to 1814; his brothers Artemas and Micajah went to Harvard, Artemas to practise law at Henniker, New Hampshire, and Micajah to keep a classical school in Baltimore, and his sister Catharine married the North Billerica manufacturer James R. Faulkner in 1825.

On April 4, 1815, he married Mehitable Blanchard, born in 1790, the daughter of Joseph Blanchard and Mehitable (Waters) Blanchard. They had nine children, several of whom died young: Emily (1816); Juliet (1817), who died on May 27, 1837, at twenty; a son Josiah, who died in January 1822 at the age of two; Rebecca (1823), who married Reynolds Rogers, a trader of Concord, New Hampshire, in 1849 and died in 1851; Mary (1825), who died of consumption in 1843; Sarah Blanchard Rogers (1827), who married Dr. Augustus Mason in 1850; Elizabeth (1831), who married Nathan Weston of Dorchester; and Mehitable (1833), who died of consumption in 1846. His wife Mehitable died on May 3, 1834, at the age of 44. He then married Lucy Bancroft of Groton, born in 1793, and their son Josiah, born on October 14, 1838, died in infancy.

Rogers was chosen a selectman in 1821, 1822 and 1823 and again in 1831 and 1832. In September 1823 he joined his fellow selectmen Marshall Preston and Jeremiah Crosby II in a complaint to the probate court that Henry Cumings, a schoolmaster and son of the late minister Henry Cumings, "does, by excessive drinking and idleness, so spend, waste, and lessen his estate" as to expose the town to the cost of his support; in November the court made John Baldwin his guardian. In 1831 the town sent him to the General Court as one of its two representatives, with Dr. Zadok Howe.

He was often called on in the settlement of his neighbors' estates. In March 1822, as "Josiah Rogers Jun.," he sat with William and Francis Richardson on the committee that set off to Sarah Crosby, widow of Josiah Crosby, her half of the Crosby homestead farm on the road to Boston. He was a surety on the bond of Betsey Crosby as executrix of her husband, Josiah Crosby II, in 1829, and on that of her executor in 1832, and in May 1832, with John Baldwin and Thomas Sumner, he took the inventory of her estate, which listed "The Homestead farm with all the buildings, including the Tavern stand." He was still witnessing deeds for the Blanchard family, his first wife's kin, in 1855.

Josiah Rogers died on December 21, 1866, at the age of 80, and was buried in the North Cemetery with his first wife and the children who had died before him. In July 1898 his daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Rogers Weston of Pasadena, California, gave the town $200, "the income to be used in keeping in good order the lot of the late Josiah Rogers in the North Cemetery," and the Josiah Rogers Fund was still among the town's cemetery trust funds in 1929.

Josiah Rogers II

Josiah Rogers II

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