♀Hannah (surname unknown)

Hannah was the wife of Ephraim Morton of Plymouth, in Plymouth Colony^W, known from the town book’s record of their children’s births between 1677 and 1685. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son John Morton.

Family

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 Ebenezer on 11 April 1685.

Her husband, Ephraim Morton (1648–1732), has his own entry in the colony’s register of births: “Ephraim Morton, the sonn of Ephraim Morton, was born on the 27th of January”, in the year the register headed 1647, which is January 1648 by modern reckoning. The register names his father but not his mother. No record of the marriage has been found, and none found gives Hannah’s surname or names her parents. Two compiled genealogies, Savage’s dictionary and a genealogy of the Rogers family published in 1978, call her Hannah Finney, and Savage makes her the daughter of John Phinney of Barnstable born on 2 September 1657; that identification rests on those works alone. The date of her death is not known; no wife is among the legatees of the will that Ephraim made at Plymouth on 3 August 1730.

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.