♀Elizabeth Cooke

Elizabeth Cooke (living in 1673) was a Devon vicar’s daughter who married William Walton, later the preacher at Marblehead on the Massachusetts coast, and had seven children with him. She crossed to New England with her husband and their young children in the 1630s. She outlived him by at least five years, and in 1673 she was made administratrix of the estate of her son Josiah, who had died of a wound from lightning at sea. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Elizabeth Walton (born 1629).

Early life

Elizabeth was probably born about 1602 at Crediton, in Devon, a daughter of William Cooke and Martha White. Her father, an Oxford-trained clergyman of Puritan sympathies, had been vicar of Crediton since 1596; her mother was a daughter of John White of Stanton St. John, in Oxfordshire.

William Cooke died early in 1615, while Elizabeth was not yet of age. His will left her £50 at twenty-one or on her marriage, with a condition: if she married “contrary to her mothers likinge” before she came of age, she was to have nothing. One of the two overseers he named was his brother-in-law John White^W, “preacher of Gods word at Dorchester”, so that Elizabeth was a niece of the Dorchester minister who helped to obtain the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company. It was under that charter that she would later make her home.

Marriage and New England

William Walton and Elizabeth Cooke were married at Holy Trinity Church, Dorchester, in Dorset, on 10 April 1627. It was the church of her uncle John White. Her husband, a Cambridge graduate, is said to have been vicar of Seaton, on the Devon coast, where their first two daughters were born. They had seven children between 1628 and 1644: John, then Elizabeth and Martha, born at Seaton in 1629 and 1632; Nathaniel, born at Hingham in New England in 1636; and Samuel, Josiah and Mary, born at Marblehead in 1639, 1641 and 1644.

The family crossed to New England in the mid-1630s and lived first at Hingham. In 1637, back in Dorchester, her widowed aunt Mary Terry named her as her niece Elizabeth Walton in her will. By 1639 they had moved to Marblehead, then a fishing station within the bounds of Salem, where her husband is said to have been the preacher until his death.

Widowhood

William Walton died in 1668. In June 1673 their son Josiah was brought in from sea wounded by lightning. Dying, he declared his will by word of mouth, a nuncupative will^W: his gray horse was to go to his brother Nathaniel and his sister Martha Munjoy, and the rest of his estate to “his Mother Walthom, for her use, & benefit during her naturall life”, and after her to his brothers and sisters, on condition that “ye land should not go out of ye name of ye Waltoms”. At the Salem court in November 1673 the will was allowed and “Mrs. Elizabeth Walton, his mother,” was appointed administratrix. The records do not show when or where she died.

Notes

Parentage

Frances Rose-Troup first identified her, in John White the Patriarch of Dorchester (1930), as the daughter of William Cooke and Martha (White) Cooke. Harold F. Porter, Jr., confirmed and extended the identification in “Mr. William Cooke, Father-in-Law of Mr. William Walton of Marblehead, Massachusetts,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 142 (1988): 361-368. Porter prints the Stockton, Wiltshire, register entry of her parents’ marriage on 27 April 1597 (“Martha White filia Joh’is White de Stanton St. Joh’is”), and William Cooke’s will, dated 7 February 1614/5 and proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 26 June 1615, which names “Elizabeth Cooke my daughter” and calls John White of Dorchester “my brother in lawe”. The will of her aunt Mary Terry, dated 6 October 1637, names among others her nieces Elizabeth Walton, Susanna Cooke and Mary Cooke and her nephew Nathaniel Cooke. The Crediton register for 1596-1615 is badly damaged, and her birth “probably ca. 1602” is Porter’s estimate.

Marriage

The register of Holy Trinity, Dorchester (a manuscript copy at the Society of Genealogists, London), as cited by Porter, writes her name “Elizabeth Cake”. The children’s births come from the Walton family’s own register, filed among the Essex County court papers and printed in the Register, volume 29 (1875), page 66, and volume 142, page 368. Her husband’s Cambridge degree and his living at Seaton are from Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses.

Josiah’s will

The nuncupative will, the testimony of Samuel Cheever, Moses Maverick and James Dennis, and the order naming her administratrix are printed in Dow, Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, volume 5, pages 253-254.