♀Alice Frost

Alice Frost was the wife of Thomas Blower and then of William Tilley, and a midwife at Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. She was most likely the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Alice Blower (died 1690).

England

Thomas Blower and Alice Frost are said to have married in 1612. Their daughter Alice was probably the Alice Blower baptized at St Gregory’s church in Sudbury, Suffolk, on 30 June 1615. She married Richard Brackett, a Sudbury man who had already been to New England, at St Katherine by the Tower in London on 6 January 1633/4, and by the end of 1634 the couple were living in Boston.

New England

On 19 September 1635 Thomas Blower, aged 50, was entered at London on the list of passengers to be carried to New England on the Truelove, whose master was John Gibbs. Alice is said to have crossed the same year, and the family probably settled at Boston, where her daughter and son-in-law were living. Thomas seems to have died soon after he arrived. About 1640 Alice married again, and by the best account she became the second wife of William Tilley of Boston.

Midwife of Boston

As Mistress Alice Tilley she was a well-known midwife in Boston. In 1649 she was charged with some unspecified wrongdoing in her work as a midwife and held in custody, and many of the women of Boston, Dorchester and other towns signed petitions supporting her and asking that she be released. In 1998 the historian Mary Beth Norton^W published the petitions in a study she titled “The Ablest Midwife That Wee Know in the Land”. Reviewing it, the Great Migration Newsletter wrote that this political action by a group of women “stands out as a unique event in the British North American colonies”.

Notes

Sources

Her marriage to Thomas Blower in 1612 is from Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700, p. 165, whose entry gives “BLOWER, Thomas (at Boston 1640) & Alice [FROST]; 1612”, citing a published Stevens–Miller ancestry. Her daughter’s baptism, marriage and parents are from Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, volume 1, pp. 205–206, in his sketch of Richard Brackett; he takes the baptism and parentage from an article in The American Genealogist (volume 52, pp. 73–75) and prints the mother’s name in brackets, because the baptism entry does not name her. Thomas’s voyage is abstracted in Peter Wilson Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants 1607–1660 (1987), pp. 166–167, where he is the only Blower on the Truelove list; her own crossing rests on the Great Migration Newsletter (p. 211), which states that she and both her husbands “had all immigrated to New England in 1635”. Anderson writes that Thomas “apparently died soon” after he came, and that the younger Alice “may have had two brothers who came to New England”.

Her second husband

Torrey (p. 165) records that a Blower widow of Boston married secondly “John TILLY” in 1640, citing the Winthrop Papers (volume 4, p. 260). Anderson, in “Alice (Frost) (Blower) Tilly”, The American Genealogist 71 (1996): 113, argues that Alice Frost was the wife first of Thomas Blower and then of William Tilley; as the later and more specific study, his account is followed here. The Great Migration Newsletter (p. 348) puts it plainly: “William Tilley had married for a second wife Alice (Frost) Blower, widow of Thomas Blower and a prominent midwife”.

The petitions

The charge and the petitions are summarized in the Great Migration Newsletter (pp. 211 and 348), which cites Anderson’s article and Mary Beth Norton, “‘The Ablest Midwife That Wee Know in the Land’: Mistress Alice Tilley and the Women of Boston and Dorchester, 1649–1650”, The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 55 (1998): 105–134. The petitions came from women of Boston, Dorchester “and other communities”; the newsletter does not say what the charge was or how the case ended.

Her family

Anderson names her as a sister of Thomasine Frost, who married Edmund Rice, an immigrant to Sudbury in Massachusetts, and of Elizabeth Frost, who married first Henry Rice and then Philemon Whale, also an immigrant to Sudbury (The Great Migration Begins 1:206). The parents shown for her on this site, Edward Frost and Thomasine Belgrave, come from an online member tree; no record yet supports them.