♀Ann (surname unknown)

Ann (surname unknown) is said to have been the wife of John Williams, an early settler of Scituate in Plymouth Colony^W, and the mother of their daughter Mary. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Williams (died 1695).

By tradition she crossed to New England with her husband in 1632, though he first appears in the colony’s records in March 1639. In a suit the physician Comfort Starr brought against John Williams at Scituate on 6 October 1657, for medicine and surgery, the record describes his wife as living and long ill, with a sore on her left thigh or hip that had been some years in the making. She is not mentioned in his will of 19 December 1667, which left nearly everything he owned to Mary, and most likely died before him. Her daughter Mary married Anthony Dodson at Scituate on 12 November 1651. Her maiden name, her parents and the dates of her birth and death are not known.

Notes

Her name

The name Ann comes from compiled genealogies: James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, Harvey Hunter Pratt’s The Early Planters of Scituate (1929) and Frederic Rockwell Sanborn’s The Ancestry of Frederic Rockwell Gladstone Sanborn (1928). Pratt has the family reaching Boston on the Charles in 1632. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins rejects that date: the first record of John Williams is his proposal as a freeman of the colony on 5 March 1638/9, and he most likely arrived late in the 1630s. Her husband’s will names his daughter Mary Dodson, his sons Edward and John and the children of John Barker, but no wife.

The 1657 suit

The suit is recorded in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, vol. 7, p. 84; no other record of her is known. It calls her “the wife of the said John Williams” and gives no name. That it is Ann rests on the compiled genealogies (see Her name above).