♀Elizabeth Mitchell

Elizabeth Mitchell (about 1629 – before 5 December 1684) was a colonist of Plymouth Colony, the wife of John Washburn of Duxbury^W and Bridgewater and the mother of eleven children, whose descent from the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke rests on a single sentence of Governor William Bradford. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Washburn (1662–1740).

Parentage

She was born about 1629, probably at Plymouth, the eldest child of Experience Mitchell (1602–1689) and his wife Jane Cooke (1604–1640), a daughter of Francis Cooke. The proof that Jane Cooke was her mother is circumstantial, and the standard Mayflower genealogy of the Cooke family says so plainly. Writing of Francis Cooke in about 1650, Bradford noted in his history of the colony, Of Plymouth Plantation^W, that Cooke “hath seen his children’s children have children”. Elizabeth was the only grandchild of Cooke known to have had children by that date, so the sentence is taken to mean her. No record names her mother directly.

Marriage and family

On 6 December 1645, at Plymouth, she married John Washburn, who had come to Boston in the summer of 1635 at the age of fourteen on the ship Elizabeth and Anne, listed with Philip Washburn, aged eleven, and Mrs. Marjorie Washburn, of Evesham in Worcestershire. The couple lived first at Duxbury, where he was chosen constable in 1659; the Duxbury lists of the 1640s carry two men of the name, styled senior and junior. In November 1664 he acknowledged the sale of land that had been given him by “his father Experience Mitchell” - in the usage of the time, his father-in-law.

The family later settled at Bridgewater, and the children were born between about 1646 and about 1675 at Duxbury and Bridgewater. Only one birth, that of the son James in 1672, was entered in a town record; the order of the others is uncertain. The birth of the ancestral daughter, Mary, is known from a letter written to Experience Mitchell in July 1662, which reports that his daughter Elizabeth had lately had a daughter, and that she already had six sons. The youngest child, Sarah, was born about 1675, when her mother was about forty-six.

Death

She was living on 1 November 1681 and had died by 5 December 1684; no record of her death or burial has been found. Her husband married secondly Elizabeth, the widow of an earlier Samuel Packard, and died at Bridgewater on 12 November 1686. His will, made a fortnight before his death, names all eleven of her children.

Notes

The Mayflower genealogy gives her birth once as about 1628 and once as about 1629; both are estimates from her marriage in December 1645, and no record of her baptism is known.