♂James Harlow

James Harlow was a man of Plympton in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He was the husband of Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797), who was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), and the third of the four men she married, after James Morton and Barnabas Phinney and before William Bonney.

Marriage and family

James Harlow married Mehitable at Plympton on 22 June 1749. She came to him as a woman who had already been married twice: to James Morton in 1736, by whom she had a son, James, born in 1739, and to Barnabas Phinney in 1745. The town clerk entered the wedding in two places, once under his name and once under hers, where she is written “Mehitibel Phiney”, the surname of her second husband.

Their son Barnabas Harlow was born on 5 November 1750, about a year and a half after the wedding, and is the only child of the marriage on record. He bore the same Christian name as his mother’s second husband.

Nothing is recorded of James Harlow’s birth, parents or death. His wife’s death entry at Plympton in 1797 lists him among her husbands and names her as the mother of Barnabas Harlow. A genealogy website dates her marriage to William Bonney to 10 February 1759.