♂Ephraim Morton

Ephraim Morton was a man of Plymouth, in Plymouth Colony^W, whose son Ephraim’s birth on 27 January 1647/48 is entered in the colony’s register of births. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Ephraim Morton (1648–1732).

Family

He was probably born about 1623. The Plymouth register of births records under the year 1647 that “Ephraim Morton, the sonn of Ephraim Morton, was born on the 27th of January”. The same register enters Rebeckah Morton, “the daughter of Ephraim Morton”, born on 15 March 1649/50, and Josias, “the sonne of Ephraim Morton”, born in 1653 on a day the clerk left blank. None of these entries names the mother.

No record states outright that the boy born in 1647/48 is the Ephraim Morton who died at Plymouth in 1732. The link rests on his age, since his gravestone put him in his 84th year, and on the other men of the name at Plymouth, who were born more than twenty years later.

A compiled account

A history of Maine families published in 1909 gives a much fuller life, which is not confirmed by a colony record. It says he married Ann Cooper on 28 November 1644, and that she died on 10 September 1691. It makes him a deacon of the Plymouth church from 1 August 1669, a lieutenant of the town’s military company from 1664, a magistrate of the colony, and a member of its Council of War through King Philip’s War^W. It credits him and Ann with nine children, among them an Ephraim, a Rebecca and a Josiah, which agrees with the register.

The same history says that in 1692 he married Mary, the widow of William Harlow, under a marriage covenant by which she kept her dower in her first husband’s estate and gave up any claim on Ephraim’s if she outlived him. In effect it kept the two estates apart; the history dates the covenant 11 October 1692. It gives his will as dated 27 September 1693 and proved on 2 November 1693.

Notes

The 1909 history gives his death as 7 September 1693, which is twenty days before the date it gives for his will. The records do not settle when he died.

Birth

Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, volume II, page 1297, gives his birth as “by 1623”. That is a limit rather than a date, so “about 1623” in the Family section is an estimate from the book’s wording.