♀Dorcas Messenger

Dorcas Messenger (23 September 1650 – 18 May 1688) was married to Peter Mills, a Dutch tailor of Windsor, Connecticut, and was a mother before she was sixteen. The couple settled on land her father gave them. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Esther Mills (about 1666–1757).

Marriage

Dorcas was a daughter of Edward Messenger, and her birth was recorded at Windsor. Her marriage to Peter Mills went unrecorded, but it had taken place by 9 June 1666, when her father deeded twenty acres to “his son in law Peter Mills”, land on which Peter had already built. Dorcas was then fifteen.

Their first child was born at about the same time. In January 1666/7 the colony’s governor, John Winthrop the Younger^W, who also practiced medicine, treated their daughter Hester, a year old, for worms. His journal names the child as the “daughter of Peter the Duchman” who had married “Goodman Messingers daughter”, and in March he noted that she had fallen ill again.

Greenfield

The family lived at Greenfield, in the western part of Windsor, a district also called Messenger’s Farms, which later became the Wintonbury parish and is now Bloomfield. When the town was counted in March 1669/70, four people lived in the house. On 16 February 1683 her father gave a dwelling house and land at Greenfield “in consideration of my love to my sone in law Peter Mills and to my daughter Dorcas his wife and there children”. In 1685 Dorcas was admitted to the Windsor church, soon after a long quarrel over the Half-Way Covenant^W that had split the town’s congregation was settled.

Death

Dorcas and Peter had eight children, born between about 1666 and 1688. The youngest, Ebenezer, was born on 8 February 1687/8, and Dorcas died at Windsor three months later, on 18 May 1688. Peter married Jane Warren of Hartford in December 1691.

Notes

Dates and name

Her birth and death are in the Windsor vital records (volume 2, page 181, and volume 1, page 48), as cited in Helen Schatvet Ullmann’s Descendants of Peter Mills of Windsor, Connecticut (1998), which spells her name “Darkas” as the record does. The Barbour abstract of the Windsor records gives the same two dates. Ullmann notes that her father leased a ferry at New London in November 1651 and is first found at Windsor in 1657, so her birth may have been entered at Windsor after the family moved there.

Her daughter Esther

Because Dorcas was so young in 1666, earlier accounts left open whether Esther, who married John Eggleston in 1682, was her daughter or a child of an earlier wife of Peter’s. Governor Winthrop’s medical journal, quoted by Ullmann, settles it: on 23 January 1666/7 he treated “Mills alias Van Meulen, Hester, 1 yr”, the daughter of Peter the Dutchman and Goodman Messenger’s daughter. The deeds of 1666 and 1683 are also quoted from the Windsor land records in Ullmann’s book. In her will of 1714 Dorcas’s unmarried daughter Dorcas Mills left “my Lands lying in Windsor in ye place Commonly Called Messengers farms or Greenfield” to John Mather and named “my Dear Sister Hester Egglestone” and “my Loving sister, Mary Soper”.