♀Jane Paine

Jane Paine (born about 1628) is known only through printed histories of early New England, which make her the wife of Thomas Mayhew, one of the first English settlers of Martha’s Vineyard. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Jedidah Mayhew (1656–1736).

Life

Charles Banks’s history of Martha’s Vineyard, published in 1925, makes her a daughter of Thomas and Jane Paine, born about 1628; her Paine name is disputed. In Banks’s words Jane Paine was Thomas Mayhew’s “step-mother’s daughter”: by his account her mother had married his father, so that the couple were stepbrother and stepsister before they were husband and wife. A guardianship of 1639, which names only one Paine child, a son, leaves that account in doubt. Banks gives no date for the marriage; a 1909 history of Maine families puts it about 1645. Banks gives the couple six children: Matthew, Thomas and John, born between 1648 and 1652, then Jerusha, Jedidah, and a sixth child who died young. Banks also calls John the minister of Tisbury and Chilmark.

Widowhood

The histories agree that Thomas Mayhew was lost at sea in 1657, and two of them place the loss in November, on a voyage from Boston to London. In September 1658 the Commissioners of the United Colonies^W recorded that she had been left “poor with six or seauen children”, and they allowed her twenty pounds.

A deed of gift she made as a widow on 20 December 1664, printed in full by Banks, gave her property to her children Matthew, Thomas, John, Jerusha and Jedidah, to take effect only if she married Richard Sarson. Banks records that she later married him.

Notes

Banks writes her mother’s maiden name as “Gallion?”, the question mark his own. James Savage’s dictionary of New England’s first settlers thought the elder Thomas Mayhew’s second wife was probably Grace, widow of Thomas Paine of London, and Jane “perhaps” her daughter. A 2001 article by Leslie Mahler in The American Genealogist, “The English Origin of Jane (Galland) Paine, Wife of Thomas Mayhew of Martha’s Vineyard”, names that wife Jane and reports her baptism at Wantage in Berkshire.

The histories do not give the date of her death.

The Maine history writes the name of her second husband as Richard Sansom; Banks and Savage write Sarson.

Her surname

The Paine name rests on Banks (volume 1, pages 118 and 119), a compiled history whose name for the mother comes from family tradition. Against it, Lechford’s Note-Book (1639, pages 184 to 186) names Thomas Mayhew the elder and his wife Jane, once the wife of Thomas Payne, as guardians of one Paine child, a son named Thomas, aged seven. Aspinwall’s letters of 1645 to 1647 say the same. WikiTree gives her an unknown surname, and Anderson’s Great Migration gives the wife of Thomas Mayhew the younger only as Jane (page 1245). The question is still open.

Her birth

Banks gives her birth as about 1628 or 1629 (volume 1, page 119), and in December 1664 he makes her about thirty-six years old (volume 2, page 105). His genealogy of the Mayhews gives about 1625 (volume 3, page 300); the age he gives in 1664 points to about 1628.

The deed of 1664

The deed is Dukes Deeds I:206, printed by Banks (volume 2, pages 107 and 108). It writes the daughter’s name Jedida; the body gives Jedidah. Banks dates the marriage to Richard Sarson after the deed (volume 2, pages 105 to 107).