This is as much an interesting and amusing puzzle as anything, but if anyone wants to try to find her..
"Amelia Dickinson-1676" married Lemuel Perin in Lenox Massachusetts, and after that she is well-documented.. But before... she's a mystery.
I found her while cleaning up my connection to Nathaniel Foote; she is stuck in with a messy assortment of duplicates in the family of Joseph Dickinson and Susannah Church, of Granby, Massachusetts, where she does not belong.
She was supposedly born in Rehoboth, MA, 13 May 1760, except the Rehoboth VR has no records for *any* Dickinsons at all. (Or Dickersons.)
She is often assigned as the daughter of my 5th gg-parents, Joseph Dickinson and Susannah Church, except:
1) that family is a Granby Massachusetts family, with no Rehoboth history;
2) Joseph and Susannah married in 1769; and
3) I've tracked down the original family record for Granby for the Joseph Dickinson family, and there is no Amelia in it.
(Azuba married Luther Ferry, stayed in Granby, and is my 4th gg-mother; she certainly did not change her name to Amelia.)
The first document I find for Amelia is her intention of marriage to Lemuel Perin, in Lenox, Massachusetts.
In the 1961 transcript of the Town Clerk's record, she is "Emelia Dickinson of Lenox," and he is Lemuel Perin of D~~~. (D~~~ is certainly Dalton MA. He was building a mill there at the time.)
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-L9JZ-VWCY?mode=g
However, FamilySearch also has the original, in which she is clearly Emetia Dicker?son. It's unmistakably Emetia -- and scanning other pages for "rs" combinations, I think also Dickerson. I don't think the crossed T is a stray mark, either; the page is remarkably clean of stray marks and blots.
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-997M-RK2Y?mode=g&i=208&cc=2061550
You can kind of understand why she might have wanted to change that; it means just what you think it might mean.
However, I cannot find her under Emetia Dickerson, or Dickinson, either.
There's one Emetia Watson -- born in Norfolk in 1785 -- 25 miles from Rehoboth.
https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-8979-WQWV?mode=g&i=114&cc=2061550
Maybe the families knew each other. Maybe they both just went for unfortunate fancy names.
Interestingly, not only is Emetia Watson the only Watson on that page, she's the only one in the Norfolk VR. And it's written very large with a big flourish -- was her birth an Event? Were the Watsons traveling through? Was she born at the Inn? Or in a stable?
http://dunhamwilcox.net/ma/norton_b6.htm
As for Emetia Dickerson, was *that* her birth name? IME, 1760 is early for fanciful names -- Pamelia is about as wild as it gets -- and Emitia is an obvious, if failed, attempt at a fancy name. However 1790-ish is definitely the period when names got hifalutin, so perhaps she herself decided that Emetia was an upgrade from some other name. Unless the Lenox town clerk made an awful error (but in fact he strikes me as an unusually careful and educated town clerk), we know that the young woman in question was willing to upgrade her name at least once, from Emetia to Amelia. So why not twice?
Also, she was 32, so could possibly have been a widow -- though if so, there ought to be a record of that.
Was she possibly from Vermont? Connecticut? New York? Anyone want to try their hand at finding Emetia Dicker?son, possibly born May 13, 1760?
