♀Christian Patten

Christian Patten (died 9 September 1649) lived at Plymouth, in Plymouth Colony^W, as the first known wife of the settler John Phinney, and she appears only once in the colony’s records. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through John Phinney (born 1638), who was most likely her son.

Marriage

John Phinney and Christian Patten are said to have married at Lenton, Nottinghamshire, England, on 22 November 1636. Her birth and her family are not known. Some compiled family trees give her maiden name as Hallett, but no record bears it out.

Death

The Plymouth register of marriages and burials for 1649 enters her death as “Christian Finny, the wife of John Finny, died the 9th of September.” The John Finny of the entry is taken to be the John Phinney who married again at Barnstable on 10 June 1650.

Notes

Marriage at Lenton

A study by Clifford L. Stott, “The Finney Family of Lenton, Nottinghamshire and Plymouth, Mass.,” in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 148 (1994), pp. 315–27, gives the marriage at Lenton on 22 November 1636 of John Phiny and Christian Patten. The study prints the last digit of the register’s year as supplied by its editor, and its text gives the date as 22 November 1636. The surname Patten also appears in a compiled genealogy, Roser’s Mayflower Increasings, which gives the son’s parents as John Finney and Christian Patten.

Mother of John Phinney

The Barnstable town records enter his eldest son, John, as born at Plymouth on 24 December 1638, without naming the boy’s mother. Christian is the only wife of John Phinney on record before 1650. The Roser compilation cited above and James Savage’s genealogical dictionary of the first settlers of New England both make her the boy’s mother, and the link therefore rests on those compiled accounts rather than on a record that names her.