♀Alice Gaylard

Alice Gaylard (baptised 10 May 1594 – after February 1668/69) was the wife of Richard Treat, first at Pitminster, in Somerset, England, and later at Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony. In August 1658 her name headed the women’s signatures on a Wethersfield petition to the colony’s General Court against the town’s minister, John Russell. The family tree makes her the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Honor Treat (1616–1690). The line runs on through Honor’s daughter Mercy Deming (1651–1714), whose place in the family rests on later genealogies and has not been confirmed.

Pitminster

Her father was probably Hugh Gaylard, as two family histories name him: Hale, House and Related Families (1952) and J. H. Treat’s The Treat Family (1893). An “Alce Gaylard” was baptized at Pitminster on 10 May 1594, and the index of that baptism names the child’s father as Hugh Gaylard. Hugh appears in the Taunton Manor Registers as early as 1573 and was buried at Pitminster on 21 October 1614, six months before her wedding.

On 27 April 1615 she married Richard Treat at Pitminster. The parish register spells her surname Gaylard; a separate index of the same register gives the date as 26 April. The same register records the baptism of a daughter of “Richard Trat” on 19 March 1615, indexed as Honor. At that time the English year began on 25 March, so the date falls at the very end of the year 1615/16, eleven months after the wedding. A daughter Joan was baptized there in 1618.

Wethersfield

By 1641 her husband was at Wethersfield. On 17 August 1658 the inhabitants of the town petitioned the General Court, saying that John Russell^W was “not our settled and approved minister”, and asked leave to find “a minister who may be faithful in the administrations of the Gospel”. The dispute had grown out of the church’s censure of Lieutenant John Hollister, whose name comes first. The petition, as Henry Stiles’s history of the town prints it, lists eleven members of the church and thirty-eight others who were not members. The women among the members sign after the men, and “Alice Treat” comes first among them, followed by “Joana Hollister”. A historian of Connecticut, G. H. Hollister, observed that the men’s and women’s names were kept apart “with as much decency as their owners would have observed in the meeting-house on the Sabbath”, and named the first woman as the wife of Richard Treat. Russell and his supporters soon afterwards left the town and settled Hadley, in Massachusetts.

Her husband’s will, dated 13 February 1668/69, left “my loving wife Alis Treat”, after his decease, all his lands within the bounds of Wethersfield, the dwelling house he had formerly lived in, the use of two of his best cows of her choosing, the standing bed and its furniture, and the use of as much of the household goods as she judged needful for her comfort. It asked his overseers, his son-in-law John Deming, Robert Webster and his son Richard, to be helpful to her. The will names three sons, Richard, Robert and James, and daughters or their husbands under the names Hollister, Johnson, Honour Deming, Matthew Camfield, John Deming and Robert Webster.

A grave memorial gives her death as 1669 at Wethersfield, where it places her burial; other compiled collections give 1670. Neither the will nor the court’s approval of it on 3 March 1669/70 says whether she outlived her husband.

Notes

The American records call her Alice Treat. An index of her husband’s probate adds the form Alice Gaylord, but the will’s own words name her only as his wife, “Alis Treat”. The register of her marriage, in her own parish, spells the name Gaylard.

Nathaniel Goodwin’s Genealogical Notes (1856) names Richard Treat’s wife as Joan, and Savage’s dictionary of the first settlers of New England, repeating a report that he brought a wife Joanna from England, supposed the widow Alice was a second wife and not the mother of his children. The Pitminster register records her marriage to Richard Treat in April 1615, eleven months before the baptism of his first daughter.