♀Alice Barter

Alice Barter married Matthew Mayhew, a yeoman of Tisbury in Wiltshire, England, and was probably the mother of Thomas Mayhew^W, the merchant who became proprietor and governor of Martha’s Vineyard. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Thomas Mayhew (died 1682).

They married at Tisbury on 2 October 1587; the register writes the couple as “Mathew Maow and Ales Barter”. Seven children were baptized there between 1589 and 1602: Elizabeth, John, Thomas, Joane, Alice, Katherine and Edward. Thomas, the third, was baptized on 1 April 1593. Matthew made his will on 31 August 1612 and had died by 27 June 1614, when it was proved. Her son Thomas was most likely the Thomas Mayhew who had reached Massachusetts Bay as a merchant by 1632 and who in October 1641 obtained, with his own son, the right to settle Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Isles.

Notes

Sources

The marriage and the baptisms come from Charles Edward Banks, “English Ancestry of Gov. Thomas Mayhew”, in The Genealogical Advertiser 4 (1901), pages 1 to 8, which prints extracts of the Tisbury parish register that Banks copied at the vicarage in 1898, and the text of Matthew’s will from the Archdeaconry of Sarum (VIII.224). The register writes her name Ales. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins follows Banks in naming Governor Thomas Mayhew’s parents as Matthew and Alice (Barter) Mayhew; Banks himself called the identification of the governor with the Thomas baptized in 1593 inferential.

Parentage and death

Banks suggested that she was a daughter of Edward and Edith Barter of Haxton, in the parish of Fittleton, whose wills are dated 6 October 1574 and 9 August 1576, and that Edward was the eldest son of James Barter of Fovant, whose will is dated 1 September 1565. This is his conjecture; no record names her parents. No burial for her is known, and Matthew’s 1612 will names no wife.