♀Esther Mills

Esther Mills (died 25 January 1757), also recorded as Hester, married John Eggleston of Windsor, Connecticut, and was the mother of eleven children. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Esther Eggleston (1682–1761).

Family

Esther was a daughter of Peter Mills, a tailor of Windsor who died in 1710, and is said to have been born about 1666. What places her in his household is the will of her unmarried sister Dorcas Mills, made in 1714 and proved in 1720. Dorcas left “all the rest of my clothes” to “my sister Esther Eaglestone”, asked her to pass something on to “my sister Mary Soper”, and left her chest to “my cousin Dorcas Eglestone”, Esther’s own daughter, “cousin” then being a common word for a niece. A nineteenth-century history of Windsor lists that Dorcas among Peter Mills’s children, and the names Mary Soper gave her own children, Pelatiah, Dorcas and Return, are the names of Peter’s family.

She married John Eggleston at Windsor on 1 June 1682. The couple had eleven children, born between 1682/3 and 1707/8. John named her executrix of his will in June 1730. He died on 10 March 1730/31, and she was a widow for nearly 26 years. A town history lists a “Widow Esther Eggleston” among the schoolmistresses of Windsor in 1735; this is probably her. She died in the Wintonbury parish of Windsor, now Bloomfield, on 25 January 1757.

Notes

Her mother is Dorcas Messenger, Peter Mills’s wife, born in 1650 and about fifteen when Esther was born. The printed Winthrop’s Medical Journal entry for 23 January 1666/7, which Ullmann quotes (page 8), calls Esther “daughter of Peter the Duchman y’ married Goodman Messingers daughter”; a Windsor deed of 9 June 1666 records that Edward Messenger gave land to “his son in law Peter Mills,” which ties that daughter to Dorcas. Peter’s probate file of 1710 holds only the papers granting administration to his son and names none of his daughters. The Wintonbury church records, as printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (volume 71, 1917, page 299), enter her death in these words: “The Widdow Hester Eggleston in the 92d year of her age.” The entry is dated 25 January 1757. Stiles’s History of Ancient Windsor (volume 1, page 453), a compiled history, names a “Widow Esther Eggleston” among the 1735 schoolmistresses; that she is Esther Mills is an inference from her widowhood.

Birth

Helen Schatvet Ullmann’s Descendants of Peter Mills of Windsor, Connecticut (1998) gives her birth as “b. in early 1666” (page 12), a compiled reading. The printed Winthrop’s Medical Journal entry for 23 January 1666/7, which Ullmann quotes (page 8), names “Mills alias Van Meulen, Hester, 1 yr: daughter of Peter the Duchman y’ married Goodman Messingers daughter”, which makes her one year old in that January. Its description of Peter as the man who “married Goodman Messingers daughter” points to Dorcas Messenger as her mother, young as she was. The birth year rests on that entry and Ullmann’s reading; no birth record is known.