♀Jenne Mahieu

Jenne Mahieu was a Walloon^W Protestant refugee at Leiden and the mother of Hester Mahieu, the wife of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Hester Mahieu (1584–1675).

Record

Jenne Mahieu appears in the records only at the Leiden betrothal of her daughter. On 30 June 1603 Francis Cooke, a woolcomber from England, was betrothed to Hester Mahieu, described as born at Canterbury; the betrothal register, entered on 4 July 1603, records the bride as accompanied by “Jenne Mahieu haer moeder” and “Jenne Mahieu haer suster”, her mother and her sister, both named Jenne Mahieu. The entry, read on the page image, names no father. She is named in the same way at the betrothals of her daughter Marie Mahieu at Leiden in 1596, to Jan Lano, and in 1605, when Marie, a widow, married Robert Mannoo; at the second Hester’s sister Antonette also attended. Another daughter, Françoise, from Bondues, was betrothed at Leiden in 1611 to Daniel Cricket of Sandwich, with her sister Marie as her witness. Neither entry, both read on the page images, names a father. Because only the mother attended in 1596, 1603 and 1605, a father may have died before 1596, but the registers do not say so.

Family

The Mahieus came from the country around Lille, now in France, as the betrothals of Hester’s sisters at Leiden show. Jeremy Bangs’s 1989 study of the Leiden records notes that a Jacques Mahieu and his wife, whose name was not recorded, were received into the Leiden Walloon church on 10 June 1590 with letters of transfer from the Walloon church in London. Whether that couple were Jenne Mahieu and her husband, and whether that Jacques was Hester’s father, has not been shown; a Mayflower genealogy calls him her probable father, and a WikiTree profile calls him her presumed but unproven father. No record of Jenne Mahieu’s birth, marriage or death has been found.