♀Elizabeth (surname unknown)

Elizabeth (buried 1614) was the eleventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son John Tilley (died 1621). She and her husband Robert Tilley lived at Henlow in Bedfordshire, England, where eight of their children were baptized between 1571 and 1590.

Life

Her own family is uncertain; her maiden name may have been Ellborne. Robert and Elizabeth Tilley brought their children to the parish church at Henlow for baptism over almost twenty years: John in December 1571, then Rose, George, Agnes, Elizabeth, William and Edward, and last Alice in February 1589/90^W. Alice died young, and was buried on 29 July 1597 as “a younge mayde”.

Death and the Mayflower sons

Robert was buried at Henlow on 21 February 1612/13, and Elizabeth, by then his widow, was buried there on 27 March 1614. The baptisms of John and Edward are accepted as those of John Tilley^W and Edward Tilley^W, two brothers who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and died in the first winter at Plymouth. Their wives died that winter too. John’s daughter Elizabeth, then thirteen, survived and married John Howland, and Roger’s line runs through her.

Notes

Her maiden name

Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins gives her only as “Elizabeth ( ) Tilley”. Roser’s Mayflower Increasings gives her as “Elizabeth (?ELLBORNE)”, with the question mark, citing Robert Leigh Ward’s study of the family in The American Genealogist (1976).

The family’s origin

Ward’s study, which Anderson follows, identifies the Henlow baptisms of John and Edward as those of the two Mayflower brothers. Edward’s baptism on 27 May 1588 is entered under the name Edmund.