♀Honor Treat

Honor Treat (1616 – before June 1690) was an English-born woman of colonial Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony, the wife of John Deming, one of the town’s first settlers. Her father’s will of 1668/69 left “my great bible to my Daughter Honour Deming”, while her youngest brother received “my little bible”. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through a daughter, Mercy Deming (1651–1714), whose place in the family rests on later genealogies and is not confirmed by a record.

Early life

She was the daughter of Richard Treat and Alice Gaylard, who married at Pitminster, in Somerset, England, on 27 April 1615. The same parish register records the baptism of a daughter of “Richard Trat” on 19 March 1615, indexed as Honor. At that time the English year began on 25 March, so the date falls at the very end of the year 1615/16: eleven months after the wedding, which makes her the couple’s first child. Read as a modern date, the baptism would fall a month before the marriage. The family later settled at Wethersfield, on the Connecticut River.

Marriage and family

She married John Deming of Wethersfield. The Treat Family (1893) dates the marriage to about 1637, and another compiled source gives about 1632. The same book describes John Deming as one of the earliest settlers of Wethersfield in 1635, a freeman from 1645, a deputy to the colony’s General Court nineteen times between 1646 and 1665, and one of the men named in the Charter of Connecticut of 1662.

Her father’s will, dated 13 February 1668/69 and exhibited in court on 3 March 1669/70, names her as “my Daughter Honour Deming”, calls John Deming his son-in-law and makes him an overseer, and leaves money to a grandson, David Deming, “son of John Deming senior”. Besides the great bible, it provides for her mother, Alice, and names her brothers Richard, Robert and James and her married sisters Hollister and Johnson.

The Treat Family lists ten children of John and Honor Deming, “not in order of birth”: John, Jonathan, Samuel, David, Ebenezer, Rachel, Mary, Sarah, a daughter who married a Beckley, and an Elizabeth said to have married Thomas Wright in 1657. John Deming’s own will, dated 26 June 1690, names his married daughters only by their husbands’ surnames: Morgan, Beckly, Hurlbut, Wright and Moody. The Wethersfield town book shows that the Elizabeth who married Thomas Wright in 1657 was Elizabeth Chittenden of Guilford, so the book’s identification of the daughter Wright is wrong.

She died at Wethersfield before 26 June 1690, when her husband made his will without naming a wife, and was buried there.

Notes

The link to Mercy Deming, who married Joseph Curtis of Wethersfield in 1673/74, rests on later genealogies. The Treat Family does not include a Mercy among Honor’s children, although, as shown above, that list is not reliable. John Deming’s 1690 will names a daughter Wright and no daughter Curtis. That fits a Mercy who had been widowed in 1683 and remarried a Joseph Wright in 1685, but no known record names her as a Deming.

The Treat Family leaves her death date blank. A grave memorial gives her 21 November 1705, the same day it gives her husband, but that is the day his will was proved at Hartford, not the day of either death. Her death before June 1690 is an inference from the will’s silence: it names his sons and his married daughters, but no wife.

Standard histories identify her brother Robert with Robert Treat, later governor of Connecticut. Her father’s will calls him only “my second sonne Robert Treat” and does not make that identification.