♂Alexander Carpenter

Alexander Carpenter (living in 1613) was a man from Wrington in Somerset who was living among the English at Amsterdam in 1600 and at Leiden by 1611, and the father of five daughters who came to New England or married men who did. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Juliana Carpenter (about 1583–1664).

Amsterdam and Leiden

On 16 December 1600 “Alexander Carpenter from Wrington” witnessed an English marriage at Amsterdam, and he had probably by then joined the English Separatists^W there. By 1611 he had moved to Leiden, where he was among the congregation that became the Pilgrims^W.

At Leiden his daughters married one after another. In July 1612 Juliana was betrothed to George Morton, a merchant from York, and the Leiden record names her “maid from Bath in England, accompanied by Alexander Carpenter, her father, and Alice Carpenter, her sister”. In March 1613 he stood with Samuel Fuller, a widower, at Fuller’s betrothal to his daughter Agnes, “from Wrington in England”; she died by 1617. In May 1613 Alice married Edward Southworth.

His daughters in New England

Alice came to Plymouth Colony^W in 1623, as most likely did Juliana with George Morton and their children, and there his daughter Alice, by then the widow of Edward Southworth, married Governor William Bradford^W. Priscilla also settled at Plymouth, the wife first of William Wright and then of John Cooper. His wife, whose name is not known, died not long before 1644 or 1646, when Bradford, writing to her daughter Mary at Wrington, noted her death and invited Mary to join her sisters; Mary soon came, and died at Plymouth, unmarried, in 1687. When and where Alexander died is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines run from Juliana through her marriage to George Morton, one through their son Ephraim Morton and one through their daughter Sarah Morton, and they meet again in James Morton (1739–1810): his father, James Morton (1714–1745), and his mother, Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797), both descended from Juliana.

Notes

Sources for his life

Everything known of him comes from records of his daughters and of the English in Holland, as gathered by Robert Charles Anderson in The Great Migration Begins, following Mary Lovering Holman’s treatment of the family in the Scott Genealogy. The Amsterdam marriage he witnessed was that of “Antoine Fetcher” and “Jenneken Richeman”. The Pilgrim Reader calls him a member of the Ancient Brethren at Amsterdam about 1609. No record of his birth, baptism or death is known.

Wrington and Bath

He and his daughter Agnes are both described as from Wrington, while the Leiden record calls Juliana a “maid from Bath”. Anderson warns that index entries published in 1988 for this family were in many cases not taken from the parish registers, and that a study of the registers of St James, Bath, and of Wrington, published a year later, is more reliable but leaves some discrepancies.

His children

Anderson dates the five sisters only from the ages given at the deaths of Juliana, Mary and Priscilla: Juliana say 1583, Agnes say 1585, Alice say 1590, Mary say 1596 and Priscilla say 1598, and he notes that these may be a few years too early. That Alice of the Leiden betrothal is the Alice who married Bradford is Anderson’s account. Some accounts also give him a son, Nathaniel, with no dates; Anderson’s outline names only the five daughters.