♀Abigail Shaw

Abigail Shaw (born about 1624) was a woman of Plymouth Colony, the daughter of the early settler John Shaw and the wife of Stephen Bryant, whose daughter, also named Abigail, married in 1665 a man of the same surname, John Bryant. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through her son John Bryant (born 1650) and her daughter Lydia Bryant (1662–1736).

Early life

Abigail Shaw was a daughter of John Shaw, a planter who had come to Plymouth by 1627, when he was named in the colony’s division of cattle, alone, with no wife or children beside him; Abigail, born about 1624, was therefore presumably born in England and brought over later, though neither her birth nor her crossing is recorded. He held land at Plymouth and later a share at Namassakett, served often on the colony’s juries, and made his mark rather than signing his deeds. Her brothers were John, James and Jonathan. Robert Charles Anderson’s study of the colony’s first settlers, The Great Migration Begins, estimates her birth at about 1624. Her mother, Alice, died at Plymouth on 6 March 1654/55; the colony’s register records that “Allice Shaw, the wife of John Shaw, died the sixt of March, 1654”, the year counted in the old style, which began on 25 March.

Marriage and family

She married Stephen Bryant about 1643. No record of the wedding survives, and the year is Anderson’s estimate. That year the Plymouth list of men able to bear arms named John Shaw, followed by his sons James and John and then by Stephen Bryant, and on 5 May 1643 Stephen Bryant and her brother John Shaw bought together forty acres of upland at the High Cliff from Edward Doty. The earliest record to state the family tie in so many words is a deed entered about 1649, in which a piece of meadow bought by John Shaw the younger was “sence sould by the said John Shaw vnto his Brother in law Steuen Bryant”, and John Shaw acknowledged before Captain Myles Standish that he had sold it “to my brother Steuen Bryant”.

The Plymouth register records six children born to Stephen Bryant between 1650 and 1665: John on 7 April 1650, Mary on 29 May 1654, Stephen on 2 February 1657/58, Sarah on 28 November 1659, Lydia on 23 October 1662 and Elizabeth on 17 October 1665. The register names only the father. A genealogy of the family published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1870 names Abigail as the mother of all of them and adds a seventh child, a daughter Abigail, whose birth the register does not record. The younger Abigail married Lieutenant John Bryant on 23 November 1665, five weeks after her youngest sister was born; the register enters it as “John Bryant married to Abigaill Bryant”. A court record of the following years names him as “John Bryant, the son in law to Steuen Bryant, of Plymouth”, when a neighbor was fined for “reviling speeches” to him on the Lord’s day as they came out of meeting. The records show no blood relationship between the bridegroom and the bride’s family; the shared surname is not explained by the records.

Her husband took a growing part in the town’s affairs: he was admitted a freeman of the colony in 1654, served as a constable and a surveyor of highways, and sat on the colony’s juries. On 30 January 1663/64 John Shaw deeded land near Namassakett, forty acres on the Smelt River and a quarter of his purchase land at Cushena, to “my son-in-law Stephen Bryant of Plymouth”. In the same deed he wrote that “my daughter Abigaill Bryant after my decease shall have my bed and all the furniture thereunto belonging, as also my chest” with whatever else belonged to him. A bed with its hangings and linen was among the most valuable things in a seventeenth-century household, so the bequest was a real portion for a married daughter, not a keepsake. Her brother James received the double share due to an eldest son, since their brother John was by then presumed dead.

She was living when her father made the deed in January 1663/64, and, if the 1870 genealogy is right that she bore all of the register’s children, still living at Elizabeth’s birth in October 1665. She probably died at Plymouth on 24 October 1694; the town clerk’s book of deaths records her as “the wife of Stephen Bryant senior”.

Lines of descent

Roger descends from Stephen Bryant and Abigail Shaw by two separate lines, both on his father’s side. The first runs through John Bryant (1650–1736), the son of Stephen Bryant and Abigail Shaw, to his daughter Joanna Bryant (1690–1746). The second runs through Lydia Bryant (1662–1736), the daughter of Stephen Bryant and Abigail Shaw, to her son Samuel Churchill (1688–1751). The two lines meet again in Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797), the daughter of Joanna Bryant and Samuel Churchill, who is Roger’s ancestor through her son James Morton.

Notes

Her birth year and the year of her marriage are estimates by Anderson, not dates from a register. He also notes that Alice is recorded as John Shaw’s wife only from 1653, so she was Abigail’s mother only if that marriage went back to about 1622. James Savage’s genealogical dictionary gives Elizabeth’s birth as 17 October 1660; the Plymouth register gives 1665. Stephen Bryant’s English origin and the date of his death are not known.

Death and identity

The town clerk’s book of deaths for Plymouth, 1693 to 1695, page 249, has the entry for 24 October 1694. Two Abigail Bryants lived at Plymouth then. The entry’s words, “the wife of Stephen Bryant senior”, fit this Abigail, Stephen’s wife, rather than a daughter of the same name, who had married John Bryant in 1665.