♀Ellen Taylor

Ellen Taylor was an Englishwoman of Bengeworth, beside Evesham, in Worcestershire, who married Robert Moore there in 1585. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Margery Moore.

The wedding, on 9 November 1585, is entered in the Bengeworth parish register in a single line: “Robart more and Elen tayler the ixth of November.” Three years later their daughter was baptized in the same parish, on 3 November 1588, as “Margery the Daughter of Robart More”. She was probably the Margery Moore who married John Washburn at Bengeworth in 1618 and who, in the spring of 1635, sailed for New England with her two sons, John and Philip. Ellen’s parents, and the dates of her own birth and death, are not known.

Notes

The register entries

Both entries come from the Bengeworth register as printed by James Davenport in The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford, in the County of Worcester (1907), page 51; Davenport says that the entries he gives in inverted commas are exact copies. They are known from that printed copy, not from the original book. The register spells her name “Elen tayler”.

Margery’s parentage

That the emigrant Margery Washburn was Ellen’s daughter is probable, not proved. The 1588 baptism names only the father, Robert, and Ellen is the only wife of his on record. Barnard’s Some Notes on the Evesham Branch of the Washbourne Family (1914) calls her “Margery Moore, daughter of Robert Moore, of Evesham”. Davenport prints only the one baptism of a Margery More at Bengeworth, and he does not say whether he looked for others; another couple of the name, Humphrey More and Margery Ordwaye, had married in the parish in 1575. Her age of forty-nine on the passenger list of 1635 points to a birth about 1586, two years before the 1588 baptism.