♂George Bonum

George Bonum (died 28 April 1704) was a planter and husbandman of Plymouth in Plymouth Colony^W, who lived in the town from at least 1641 until his death and sat again and again on the juries of the colony court. Three of his daughters in a row were named Sarah: the first, born in December 1649, died that same winter, and the name was given twice more, the last time to a girl born on 10 December 1653. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Sarah Bonum (1653–1742).

Life in Plymouth

George Bonum was at Plymouth by 1641, when he and Thomas Clark were among the townsmen who sued James Luxford for debt, attaching goods of his held by other men. On 20 December 1644 he married Sarah Morton. In 1647 he sold John Faunce the lot next to Faunce’s own at the Eel River “with the housing and ffencings therabouts”, for seven pounds payable in corn or cattle over three years; Sarah gave her consent, and husband and wife both put their marks to the deed.

In 1653 George, described as a planter, bought from Richard Sparrow of Eastham a house and garden with its fruit trees in the south street of Plymouth near the mill, together with six acres of upland in the New Field. In 1656, now called a husbandman, he paid John Rickard three pounds ten shillings for twenty-five acres of upland at Fresh Lake.

He took the oath of fidelity at Plymouth in 1657 and was a freeman^W of the colony. From about 1660 into the 1670s he was sworn repeatedly on the juries that tried civil suits at the colony court in Plymouth.

Family

George and Sarah’s daughter Patience married Richard Willis in 1670, and Ruth, probably another daughter, married Robert Barrow in 1666. Their son, George, was born about 1657. Richard Willis had died by 15 February 1683, when George, “in Consideration of the Naturall affection … I Beare unto my granddaughter Ruhamah Willis”, gave her his six-acre share of meadow in the lower south meadows of Plymouth; Sarah again gave her consent.

Death

George Bonum died at Plymouth on 28 April 1704, said to be 86 years old. He had been granted a thirty-acre lot at Monponsett, in the part of Plymouth that became the town of Plympton in 1707. In 1713 his son George sold that lot, “granted to my Honoured Father George Bonum Deceased”, to “my Brother in Law John Briant of Plymton”, whose wife Sarah was most likely the Sarah born in 1653.

Notes

His daughter Sarah and John Bryant

No record names the wife of John Bryant of Plympton as a Bonum; the link rests on the 1713 deed. Its phrase “Brother in Law” could also mean that the younger George married a sister of John Bryant, but compiled accounts (the Boston Transcript in 1924; Mary Lovering Holman’s Scott Genealogy, 1919) give the younger George one wife only, Elizabeth Jenney, married in 1681. The same deed names “James Briant son to the sd John Briant”, which ties the buyer to the John Bryant whose wife Sarah bore James in 1682. Her gravestone at Plympton gives her death on 10 January 1741/2 in her 89th year, which fits a birth in December 1653.

His wife

The Plymouth register records the marriage of “Georg Bonum and Sarah Morton” on 20 December 1644, and his wife Sarah consented to his deeds of 1647 and 1683. Savage’s dictionary and the Scott Genealogy make her a daughter of George Morton of Plymouth, born about 1618; compiled accounts differ on her death, giving 1691 or 1694.

His age and the date of his death

The date of his death, 28 April 1704, and his age of 86 come from the Scott Genealogy and an earlier compiled account by Leach; the age would put his birth about 1618. By 1713 his son’s deed called him deceased. The second daughter Sarah was born on 12 January 1650 by the register’s year, which falls in what is now counted as 1651. The births of Ruth and Patience are not in the register; the Scott Genealogy places them about 1645 and 1647 and records a deed of 1679 from George to “his daughter Ruth and her husband Robert Barrow”. Patience’s place in the family rests on record: deeds printed in the Mayflower Descendant in 1923 show her as a daughter of George and Sarah Bonum, and her daughter Ruhamah as the sole heir of Richard Willis.