♀Desire Gorham

Desire Gorham (2 April 1644 – 30 June 1700) was a colonist born at Plymouth who married John Hawes of Yarmouth, on Cape Cod, in 1661 and spent the rest of her life there. A collection of Barnstable family notes says that she “has a numerous posterity” and that “all of the name of Hawes in this County are her descendants”. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Benjamin Hawes (1683–1722).

Early life

Desire was born at Plymouth, in Plymouth Colony, on 2 April 1644. The Barnstable family notes, compiled in the nineteenth century from the Barnstable and Yarmouth town records, call her a daughter of Captain John Gorham. The Great Migration series of studies of the first New England settlers names her parents as John Gorham and Desire Howland, and calls her a granddaughter of John Howland, who came over on the Mayflower in 1620. John Howland’s own will of 1672 names a daughter, “Desire Gorham”. The court settlement of her mother’s estate on 5 March 1683/84, printed from the original records, names a daughter Desire among the eleven children, and the inventory of the estate records silver lent to John Hawes, her husband.

Marriage and family

On 7 October 1661 she married John Hawes (1640–1701) at Yarmouth. He was the only son of Edmond Hawes, a cutler who had come from London in 1635 and settled first at Duxbury and then at Yarmouth, where he served for many years as town clerk. John rose in the town’s militia from ensign to captain and served as town treasurer and as the town’s representative in the 1690s.

A compiled family article published in a New England family history lists eleven children of the couple, born between 1662 and 1683: Elizabeth, Mary, Experience, Edmond, John, Joseph, Jabez, Ebenezer, Isaac, Desire and Benjamin. Her husband’s will, made in October 1701, names nine of them, among them the daughters Desire and Experience, then still unmarried and given the right to live in the east end of the house. The overseers named in that will were his “loving brothers” Major John Gorham and John Thacher; in the usage of the time the word covered brothers-in-law.

Desire Gorham died at Yarmouth on 30 June 1700, aged 56, according to the Barnstable notes. Her husband died seventeen months later, on 11 November 1701.

Notes

The Barnstable family notes correct an earlier printed account, Freeman’s history of Cape Cod, which said that she married Samuel Hinckley. The notes reply that the Barnstable and Yarmouth records show her marriage to John Hawes, and that Samuel Hinckley married Mary Goodspeed in 1664 and Mary Fitzrandolphe in 1668/69.

Her birth date is known from later compilations rather than from a birth record. Her age at death, 56, agrees with a birth in 1644. The Great Migration sketch and a lineage-society application give Barnstable, not Yarmouth, as the place of the 1661 marriage.