Annis Bayford

Our ancestor Annis Bayford was probably born in Fornham, Essex, England. She emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony with her husband, William Chandler, 1595-1641, and children as part of the Great Migration in the 1630s. The date was probably 1634 or 1635, since son William was buried in England in 1634 and daughter Sarah was born in Massachusetts in 1635. There is some doubt about the date, because husband William's 13-year-old twin daughters from his first marriage were buried in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, in 1636 (their mother had died 11 years before).

This was a close-knit family. The daughter of Annis and William's daughter Hannah Chandler, 1630-1711, whose name was Hannah Abbott, 1650-1741, married the son of Annis and William's son Thomas Chandler, 1628-1703, whose name was John Chandler I, 1655-1721; in other words, John and Hannah were first cousin spouses. This John's younger sister Sarah Chandler, 1661-1757 became the grandmother of the Samuel Phelps III, 1712-1795 who married John's granddaughter Priscilla Chandler, 1713-1778, Samuel's second cousin. First-cousin spouses John and Hannah had two sons, both of whom are are direct ancestors of ours, so that two of his great-grandchildren (Priscilla Chandler Phelps's son Joshua Phelps I, 1738-1798 and Lois Ballard, 1746-1836) were also married as second cousins. New England apparently had a very restricted gene pool.

Annis, her brothers, her three husbands, and two of her stepchildren, Elizabeth and John Dane, were part of the puritanical, idealistic Righteous Generation. Her father was part of the adaptive Sentimental Generation. All the rest of her children and stepchildren were part of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation.

The name Annis is sometimes rendered as Agnes.