♀Hannah Pontus

Hannah Pontus (about 1623 – 22 December 1690) was a daughter of an early settler of Plymouth Colony^W. She married John Churchill there, was left a widow with six children before she was forty, and married again in 1669. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son William Churchill (born 1656).

Family

Hannah was a daughter of William Pontus, who was at Plymouth by 1633, and she had one sister, Mary. She is said to have been born in Holland or England about 1623. Her father was probably the William Pautes, a fustian^W-worker from near Dover, who was married at Leiden on 4 December 1610 to Wybra Hanson, when William Brewster^W, the elder of the Pilgrim church, stood as his witness. If so, Wybra was Hannah’s mother, and the family belonged to the company of English exiles at Leiden from which the Pilgrims came. Her father died on 9 February 1653 and left his small estate, by a will of 1650, to his two daughters.

Marriage and widowhood

On 18 December 1644 she married John Churchill (died 1 January 1662/3) at Plymouth. The next summer he bought Richard Higgins’s farm near Browne’s Rock, and the family is said to have made its home at Hobshole, a neighborhood of Plymouth town. John and Hannah had six children between 1647 and 1657: Joseph, Hannah, Eliezer, Mary, William and John.

John fell ill at the end of 1662 and died soon after, most likely on 1 January 1662/3. His will, spoken from his sickbed, left Hannah the use of all his lands for as long as she lived; the new house was to pass to Joseph only at her death. He did not know, he said, whether anything would be left once the children were brought up. Her eldest son was then about sixteen.

On 25 June 1669 she married Giles Rickard as his third wife, and she outlived him by six years. She is said to have died at Hobshole on 22 December 1690, “in her sixty-seventh year”.

Notes

The records

Her life is known from Gardner Asaph Churchill and Nathaniel Wiley Jones, The Churchill Family in America (1904), pp. 2-5, which prints her husband’s will from the Plymouth Colony Book of Wills. Both marriages are also in Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700. The family history spells her second husband “Giles Rickard” and also “Giles Richard (or Reccord)”, and gives her place of death as “Hobb’s Hole”.

Her parents

That William Pontus of Plymouth was the William Pautes of Leiden is the family history’s identification, drawn from Charles B. Richardson’s notes from the Leiden records, published in the Historical Magazine in 1859. The book’s evidence is a name: Hannah’s sister Mary, who married James Glass on 31 October 1645, called a daughter Wybra, born on 9 August 1649, and so uncommon a name points back to Wybra Hanson. William Pontus’s wife was living in 1633, but she is named only as “Goodwife Pontus”. The link is likely but unproven.