♀Jane Cooke

Jane Cooke (about 1604 – before 1640) was a daughter of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke (1583–1663) and his wife Hester Mahieu (1584–1675). She stayed behind in Leiden with her mother when her father and her brother John sailed in 1620, and crossed to Plymouth three years later, where she married Experience Mitchell (1602–1689). She was the ninth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Elizabeth Mitchell (1629–1684).

Early life

No record of her birth or baptism has been found. Her parents had married at Leiden in Holland in 1603, members of its French-speaking Walloon church, and their next three children were baptised or buried there in 1607, 1608 and 1611. A Mayflower genealogy reasons from the order of the children in a 1627 Plymouth list, and from the ages at which her brothers and sisters married, that she was most probably born about 1604, the eldest child, and was probably named for her mother’s mother; the other possible year is about 1609.

When Francis Cooke sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 he took only his son John. His wife and three of the other children followed on the Anne, which reached Plymouth in August 1623, and the land division made at Plymouth late that year assigned acres to Francis Cooke for them; the same genealogy counts Jane among those three children.

Marriage and family

In the division of the colony’s cattle on 22 May 1627 she is still listed as “Jane Cooke”, in her father’s household. Listed with the Cooke family that day was Experience Mitchell, one of six unmarried young men, who had also come over on the Anne in 1623 and was probably living with them. She married him at Plymouth soon after that date. Their daughter Elizabeth was born about 1629, and the Mayflower genealogy credits Jane with two more children, a son Thomas, whose own deed of 1672 names Francis Cooke as his grandfather, and very probably a daughter Mary, born about 1632. In 1631 her husband sold his dwelling house and garden plot at Plymouth to Samuel Eddy for twelve pounds.

She died in Plymouth Colony after about 1632, the probable year of her last child, and before 1640, when her husband is thought to have remarried; he later moved his family to Duxbury. The date of her death is not recorded. She was certainly dead by the winter of 1650/51, when Governor William Bradford, writing Of Plymouth Plantation^W, counted only three of Francis Cooke’s children by his wife as still living, and those three were her brother Jacob and her sisters Hester and Mary.

Notes

The descent through her daughter Elizabeth rests on circumstantial evidence. No record names Elizabeth Mitchell as Jane’s daughter. The Mayflower genealogy relies on Bradford’s remark, written about 1650, that Francis Cooke “hath seen his children’s children have children”: by that date Elizabeth, who married John Washburn at Plymouth in December 1645, was the only grandchild of Francis Cooke known to have had children, so the genealogy takes her to be the grandchild Bradford meant, and therefore a child of Experience Mitchell’s first marriage, to Jane.

It was once believed that Jane was the mother of all eight of Experience Mitchell’s children. The genealogy gives her only the first three, and it assigns the later ones to his second wife, Mary.

A family chart of the Cooke line and Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins place her birth “say 1609”. This bio follows the tree and the Mayflower genealogy in preferring about 1604.