Sarah (Morecock) Boylston (1696-1774)

She was married in 1715 to the wealthy merchant Thomas Boylston, of Boston. They had eight children of which seven (above) reached adulthood. Her husband died in 1739 and Mrs Boylston helped her sons, Nicholas and Thomas, "build the business into a sizeable fortune". In the early 1760s, she purchased a mansion on School Street, Boston, and commissioned the leading portraitist in the colonies, John Singleton Copley, to paint pictures of herself and her surviving children to be displayed in her new house.