♀Emlyn Weeke

Emlyn Weeke (buried 30 August 1628) was the wife of John Michell, a yeoman of the parish of Colyton in Devon, England, and outlived him by eight years. She was most likely the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Michell (1576–1648).

She came to Colyton from another parish. On 26 November 1569 John Michell married Emlyn Weeke at Colyton; the register describes her as late of Gittisham, written “Gytsome”. Nine children were baptized at Colyton between 1571 and 1592, from Joan, the eldest, to Dorothy, the youngest; the entries name only their father. The family lived in turn at Cadhayne, Minchinholme and Barretshayes, all within the parish. Their daughter Elizabeth was buried unmarried on 18 January 1602/3, at the age of 23. John Michell was buried at Colyton on 2 June 1620, and Emlyn was buried there as his widow on 30 August 1628, entered in the register as “Emlyn Michell, widow”.

Notes

Sources

The family is known from the parish register of Colyton, which A. J. P. Skinner transcribed and the Devon & Cornwall Record Society printed in 1928. John Insley Coddington gathered the Michell entries into a family in his article on Jonathan Gillett and Mary Dolbiar in The American Genealogist (April 1939), and the dates here are the ones he printed. Her parents are not known.

Mother of the nine children

Her marriage is entered as “John Mychell, s. of John Mychell the younger of Rawkerayne, & Emlyn Weeke, late of Gytsome”. The baptisms of the nine children, the first in 1571, name no mother. She is taken as the mother of them all because she married John Michell in 1569, two years before the first baptism, and was buried as his widow in 1628. Coddington called his Michell pedigree tentative.