Sympathy Saturday ~ Samuel Greele's Wives

Ancestry.com now has Massachusetts Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988 available to search. My third great-grandfather, Samuel Greeley (or Greele) (see Surname Saturday ~ Greeley for my Greeley ancestry) had four wives.

I was looking for the death record for Samuel's second wife, Louisa May Greeley, who was my third great-grandmother (and was the only one of his wives to bear him children who survived) and I found the following record of Boston deaths, listed alphabetically:

Ancestry.com, Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620-1988
(Provo, UT, USA, Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011), www.ancestry.com, Database online.

The top of the right hand page shows the deaths of three of his four wives:

Lydia Maria (Sewall) Greeley, d. Aug 11, 1822, at age 32, was his first wife. Cause of death was "Child bed" and she was buried in the "Chapel Gd V P". She had earlier given birth to a daughter, Abigail, in 1814, who died at six days old.

Louisa (May) Greeley, d. Nov 14, 1828, at age 36, of Bilious fever (a term no longer used, but could possibly refer to typhoid, malaria, or hepatitis). She was buried in the Central Burying Ground on Boylston Street in Boston. Her children were Samuel Sewall Greeley (1824-1916) and Louisa May Greeley (1827-1903).

Maria Antoinette (Paine) Greele, d. Mar 26, 1842, age 58, of Lung fever (pneumonia). She was buried at the Granary Burial Ground on Tremont Street in Boston.

Samuel died August 16, 1861, leaving a widow, Sarah. He is buried in a plot at Forest Hills Cemetery, in Jamaica Plain with no stone and no additional family members in the plot. More about his widow, Sarah is found here.