♀Jane Clark

Jane Clark (died after 1666) was the wife of William Collier, a London grocer who became a magistrate of Plymouth Colony^W, and the mother of twelve children recorded in Southwark, across the Thames from London. Only four of them, all daughters, lived to grow up, and two of those daughters were married at Plymouth on the same day. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Sarah Collier (1616–1691).

Southwark

Her parents are not known, and Clark may have been the name of an earlier husband rather than her own (see Notes). On 16 May 1611, according to the published registers, she married William Collier at St Olave’s Church^W in Southwark. He had been sworn into the Grocers’ Company two years before, at the end of his apprenticeship.

Between 1612 and 1626 twelve children of the marriage appear in the registers of St Olave’s and of St Mary Magdalen in neighboring Bermondsey, and eight of them died young in Southwark. John, the first of two sons of that name, was buried in 1618, Catheren in 1622 and James in 1624. Then, between 30 May and 31 August 1625, Martha, the second John, William and Hannah, who was eleven, were buried one after another, in the summer the plague returned to London; no cause of death is recorded. Lydia, baptized the following March, was buried four days later.

The four who survived all married in Plymouth Colony. Mary married Thomas Prence^W, later governor of the colony, on 1 April 1635. Rebecca married Job Cole and Sarah married Love Brewster on 15 May 1634, the same day and at the same place, and Elizabeth married Constant Southworth on 2 November 1637.

Plymouth Colony

Her husband came to Plymouth in 1633. The records do not say when she followed him, but she was in the colony by June 1653, when “Mrs. Jane Collyare” came before the Plymouth court “in behalf of her grandchild”, the wife of Nathaniel Warren, a son of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren^W, in a dispute over land. Nathaniel’s wife was Sarah Walker, not a Collier, and her kinship to Jane is the best clue to Jane’s life before her marriage.

In December 1659 her husband accused Joseph Prior of “pilfering and purloining practices”: Prior had drawn a young maid, a kinswoman of Collier’s, into helping him to goods that belonged to Collier, “without knowledge of or leave from Mr. Collyare or Mis[tress] Jane Collyare, his wife”. She was still living on 28 June 1666, when she gave her consent to a deed made by her husband. Nothing later is recorded of her, and the date and place of her death are not known.

Notes

Sources

The marriage, the children’s baptisms and burials, and the court entries of 1653 and 1659 are taken from Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins (vol. 1, pp. 446–450), which cites printed transcripts of the St Olave’s and Bermondsey registers in The American Genealogist (vols. 49 and 51) and the published records of Plymouth Colony. Her consent to her husband’s deed of 28 June 1666 is cited there to the Plymouth Colony land records, and his apprenticeship and admission to the Grocers’ Company in 1609 to an article in The American Genealogist (vol. 42). The marriages of Rebecca and Sarah on 15 May 1634 are printed in the Plymouth Colony court records.

The court entry of 1653

Anderson dates the entry 7 June 1653, from the Mayflower Descendant; the Mayflower Society’s genealogy of Richard Warren’s descendants gives 11 June 1653, and says that the parties agreed to let the court settle their differences over lands of the late Richard Warren.

Her name

The genealogist John Insley Coddington suggested that Jane was already the widow of a man named Clark when William Collier married her, and that a daughter of that first marriage married a Walker. On that reading Sarah, daughter of William Walker, baptized at St Olave’s on 10 November 1622, was the “grandchild” of 1653, and the “kinsman William Clark” to whom William Collier made over ten acres at Duxbury in 1649/50 was a relation from Jane’s first marriage. Anderson notes that the suggestion would explain both records, but it remains a suggestion; if it is right, Jane’s maiden name is not known.