♀Alice (surname unknown)

Alice (died 6 March 1654/55) was a woman of Plymouth Colony whose death is entered in the town’s register of births, marriages and deaths; she was married to the early Plymouth planter John Shaw. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, both through her daughter Abigail Shaw (born about 1624). Her maiden name, her parents and her date and place of birth are not known.

Family at Plymouth

Her husband had come to Plymouth by 1627, when the colony divided its cattle among the settlers; the list names John Shaw at the head of the sixth lot with no wife or children beside him. In July 1630 he agreed with John Winslow to buy Winslow’s arable land in the tract called “Knaues acre otherwise named Woodbee”, signing with his mark. The Shaw children married and settled at Plymouth: about 1649 her son John Shaw the younger sold a piece of meadow to “his Brother in law Steuen Bryant”, the husband of her daughter Abigail. The sons James and Jonathan, whom John Shaw names as “my son James Shaw” and “my son Jonathan Shaw” in his deed of 30 January 1663/64, also married at Plymouth: James to Mary Mitchell on 24 December 1652, and Jonathan to Phebe Watson on 22 January 1656/57.

Death

The Plymouth register records her death in a single line: “Allice Shaw, the wife of John Shaw, died the sixt of March, 1654”, a date that falls in 1655 by the modern reckoning of the year. A compiled genealogy lists the children “with first wife”. Robert Charles Anderson’s study of the colony’s first settlers, The Great Migration Begins, finds her named as John Shaw’s wife only from 1653, and treats her as the mother of his children only if the marriage went back to about 1622; she may instead have been a second wife.

Lines of descent

Roger descends from Alice by two separate lines, and both run through her daughter Abigail Shaw (born about 1624). One goes through Abigail’s daughter Lydia Bryant (1662–1736) and her son Samuel Churchill (1688–1751). The other reaches Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797) through her mother Joanna Bryant (1690–1746), who also descends from Alice. The two lines meet again in Mehitable Churchill, whose parents were Joanna Bryant and Samuel Churchill, and from her they run on to Roger through his father’s side of the family.