♂Ephraim Morton

Ephraim Morton (27 January 1648 – 18 February 1732) was a man of Plymouth, in Plymouth Colony^W and later the Province of Massachusetts Bay, whose will of 1730 left his son John “all my wearing apparel & the Chest wherein they are commonly put”. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Morton (1680–1739).

Family

The Plymouth Colony register of births records, under the year 1647, “Ephraim Morton, the sonn of Ephraim Morton, was born on the 27th of January.” The register’s year began in late March, so the entry belongs to January 1648 by modern reckoning. It names only the father. A history of Maine families published in 1909 gives the parents as Ephraim Morton and Ann Cooper of Plymouth and calls him their second son. Two other Ephraim Mortons appear at Plymouth in these years, and neither can be the man of the 1730 will: one, a son of George Morton born in 1670, was dead by 1718 according to a compiled genealogy, and the other was this man’s own son, born in 1678, who died before 1730. The testator is therefore the Ephraim born in 1648, and the father named in the register is probably the elder Ephraim Morton of the 1909 history, though no record says more than the name.

The Plymouth town book records the births of the couple’s children under the heading “The Children of Ephraim Morton and Hannah his wife”, and the printed Vital Records of Plymouth gives the list as five: Hannah on 7 November 1677, Ephraim on 31 October 1678, John on 20 July 1680, Joseph on 4 March 1683 and, on the fifth line, “Ebenezur born April the 11th 1685”. The 1909 history gives the same date for Ebenezer, and Ephraim’s will names him as a son.

No record of the marriage has been found, and none found gives Hannah’s surname or names her parents; the first child’s birth in 1677 is the earliest date that bears on it. Compiled works, among them Savage’s dictionary, the 1909 history and a genealogy of the Rogers family published in 1978, call her Hannah Finney or Phinney, and Savage makes her the daughter of John Phinney of Barnstable born on 2 September 1657. The 1909 history dates the marriage to about 1675 or 1676. Those statements rest on the compilations alone.

The John Morton through whom the line descends married Reliance Phinney at Barnstable on 27 December 1705, and their children were born at Plymouth from 1706. No record found names the father of Reliance’s husband, so his identification with the John born to Ephraim and Hannah in 1680 rests on age and place: he is the only John Morton found in the Plymouth birth records who was of an age to marry in 1705, and Ephraim’s will shows that his son John was still living in 1730.

Will and death

Ephraim Morton made his will at Plymouth on 3 August 1730. After the bequest to John, he left three pounds to Susanna Morton, the widow of his son Ephraim, who had therefore died by then; three pounds each to his grandsons Nathaniel and Benjamin Warren; and five shillings to his son Ebenezer. Everything else, real and personal, went to his son Joseph, whom he named sole executor. The will gives no reason for the difference in the shares, and no wife is among its legatees. It was proved by oath at Plymouth on 10 March 1731/2.

He died at Plymouth on 18 February 1732, the year written 1731/2 on his gravestone. The stone on Burial Hill, as printed in the 1909 history, reads: “Here lyes ye body of Mr. Ephraim Morton, who dec’d Febry ye 18th 1731-2 in ye 84th year of his age.” Benjamin Drew’s 1894 transcription of the Burial Hill gravestones gives the same death date and age. The age on the stone is a year off from the birth register, whose date is the one used here.

Notes

The printed Vital Records of Plymouth carries Ebenezer as the fifth line of the town book’s list. A digitised image of the town-book page that was examined shows only the first four lines, so it is not settled whether the fifth line sits below what that image showed or the printed volume follows the original book more fully.