Hannah Brewer

Our Andover ancestor Hannah Brewer was probably born in England and came over to Massachusetts Bay Colony as a very young child with her parents as part of the Great Migration in the 1630s. She married into a close-knit family, the Chandlers. Her husband Thomas's younger sister Hannah Chandler, 1630-1711 was the mother of Hannah Abbott, 1650-1741, who married Hannah and Thomas's son John Chandler I, 1655-1721, her own first cousin. 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. Our Hannah's son John and his first-cousin wife 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.

Hannah and her husband were part of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation. Her children were part of the heroic, civic-minded Glorious Generation.