“Elizabeth Parmenter's father was not Joseph Parmenter and Lydia Rice (or whatever it says).  That is an error in the Shattuck Genealogy.  I spent a couple of years tracking down records because I had always heard that her parents were Deliverance Parmenter and Ruth Hayden.  I finally found Joseph's will in the Boston Public Library.  It showed his daughter as Elizabeth Smith.  I worked out all the possibilities and it was impossible that she was Thomas Shattuck's wife.  Then I found a book called the Ancestry of Ezra Holton written in 1953.  The author had figured all that out before I was born!

Here is what he says  "There can be no reasonable doubt, however, that she belonged in this family [Deliverance and Ruth Hayden Parmenter].  The "Shattuck Genealogy" makes her the Elizabeth born in 1722, daughter of Joseph Parmenter, but Joseph's will names his daughter as Elizabeth Smith.  Moreover the late Mr. A. H. Ward and the late Dr. Thomas Stearns, the latter a town clerk of Sudbury for many years and both men students of early Sudbury families (they had intended to publish a "genealogical register" of their findings), both place Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Shattuck in this family and there is no other Elizabeth on record of suitable age.  E.L.M. has also looked up wills and deeds of other Parmenters of the period for evidence of daughters named Elizabeth whose births may not has been recorded, but has found non. It is a fair interence that she was not only probably but actually the daughter of Deliverance [Parmenter]." ®332