♀Eleanor Cogan

Eleanor Cogan (died after 20 August 1693) was the wife of Walter Deane, one of the early settlers of Taunton, in Plymouth Colony^W. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Benjamin Dean (died between 1723 and 1725). She came from South Chard, in Somerset, where in 1654 her father’s will named two daughters called Eleanor: herself, by then across the ocean, and a younger sister who was still under age.

Family

Her father, William Cogan, was a tanner of South Chard. He made his will on 24 April 1654, and it was proved on 23 June 1655. It named “my daughter Eleanor Deane wife of Walter Deane in New England”, and two daughters who still bore his name, Joane Cogan and a second Eleanor Cogan, who was made executrix although she was a minor. Two living daughters of the same name point to two marriages, with Eleanor of New England as an elder daughter by her father’s first wife. The Cogans and the Deanes lived in the same place: a William Cogam, most likely her father, witnessed the will of Walter’s father, William Deane of South Chard, in 1634.

When and where Walter Deane and Eleanor Cogan married is not known. Their children probably included three sons, Joseph, Ezra and Benjamin, and a daughter, Mary, who was married to Shadrack Wilbore by 1659. On 20 August 1693 Walter and Eleanor together made a deed to Isaac Dean, the last record of either of them.

Notes

Her father’s will

The will of William Cogan of Southchard, tanner, was proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W (register Aylett, 283) and printed in full in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 51 (1897), pp. 434–435.

Her parentage

H. Clark Dean, “Eleanor Cogan, the Wife of Walter Deane of Taunton: An Evaluation of the Evidence”, NEHGR 147 (1993), pp. 240–254, set out the case, drawing also on a manorial record; the Great Migration Newsletter summed it up: she was “an elder daughter of William Cogan, by a first wife, and was not the sister of John Strong”. The older view, in William Reed Deane’s “The Deane Family” (NEHGR 3, 1849), made Walter’s wife a daughter of Richard Strong of Taunton, England, and a sister of Elder John Strong, because Walter called John Strong his “brother” in two deeds of 1691. The editor of NEHGR 51 took Walter’s sister Margerie, named in their father’s 1634 will, as John Strong’s first wife, which would make the two men brothers-in-law through her.

Baptism

Dean proposed that she was the “Ellen the daughter of William Cogan” baptized at Chard on 12 October 1609. That is a likely candidate, not a proved identification.

Children and death

Deane’s 1849 account names Joseph, Ezra and Benjamin as Walter’s sons; Mary’s marriage to Shadrack Wilbore comes from Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, citing The American Genealogist 59:224–230. The deed of 20 August 1693 is in the Bristol County deeds (7:351); Deane called it “the latest date at which we can learn that either was living”.