♀Joan Fowle

Joan Fowle (1604 – 15 July 1688) was the mother of thirteen children born in Kent and on Rhode Island, and the wife of Richard Borden, one of the first planters of Portsmouth in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations^W. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through her daughter Mary Borden (died before 1691).

England

Richard Borden and Joan Fowle were most likely the couple who married at Headcorn, in Kent, England, on 28 September 1625. Their first two children, Richard and Thomas, were christened at Headcorn in 1626 and 1627, and four more at Cranbrook between 1628 and 1634: Francis, Jane, Mary and Elizabeth. The young Richard, Jane and Elizabeth are not named in their father’s will and probably died young.

Portsmouth

The family had crossed to New England by 1638, when Richard was allotted five acres at the new settlement of Portsmouth, on Aquidneck Island. A son, Matthew, was born there in May 1638, and a family history of 1899, citing the Friends’ records, names him the first child of English parents born on Rhode Island. John, Joseph, Sarah, Samuel, Benjamin and Amey followed between 1640 and 1654, so that Joan bore children over almost thirty years. The family were Quakers, and the Friends’ Monthly Meeting at Newport kept the births of the children born on the island.

Widowhood

Richard died on 25 May 1671 without a written will, and the will that the town council of Portsmouth made from testimony about his wishes provided for Joan in detail. For the rest of her life she was to have the old house with its fire room, lean-to and buttery, two chambers and a share of the great hall and cellars in the new house, firewood every year, the fruit of thirty trees of her choosing in the orchard, and leave to keep up to forty fowls about the house.

Thirty ewes and three cows were to be kept for her, and each year she was to receive a well-fed beef, three well-fed swine, ten bushels of wheat, twenty of Indian corn, six of barley malt and four barrels of cider. Her son Thomas owed her a barrel of pork and a firkin of butter a year, and several of her children’s legacies were to be paid only after her death. Joan outlived her husband by seventeen years and died on 15 July 1688.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through their daughter Mary Borden, who married John Cook, and her son John Cook (1656–1737), whose daughter Ruth Cook married Preserved Fish. Two of Ruth’s children carried them on: her son Thomas Fish (1703–1786), whose granddaughter was Waite Allen (1766–1850), and her daughter Amy Fish (1705–1745), whose grandson was Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828). Waite and Batchelder married each other, and the two lines meet again in their daughter Salena Sherman (1806–1842), through whom both descend to Roger.

Notes

Her surname and the Kent records

Her maiden name, Fowle, is given in the FamilySearch record of the Headcorn marriage of “Richard Borden” and “Joane Fowle” on 28 September 1625; a second entry for the same couple gives 28 October 1625, in Kent. A compiled pedigree by Moriarty, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 75 (1921), pages 226 to 233, gives her as the daughter of Richard Fowle of Frittenden and Headcorn, yeoman, and of his wife Mary. The pedigree prints no baptism for her, and none is known. The christenings, all with the father named Richard Borden, come from FamilySearch indexes of English christenings: Richard on 9 July 1626 and Thomas on 3 October 1627 at Headcorn, and “Frauncis” on 28 December 1628, Jane on 9 January 1630/31, Mary on 13 January 1632/33 and Elizabeth on 25 May 1634 at Cranbrook. The January years are Old Style^W, when the year began on 25 March.

No record states that this Kent couple is the Richard and Joan Borden of Portsmouth. The identification is that of later genealogists, and it fits: Thomas, Francis and Mary are the three eldest children in John Osborne Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887), in the same order, and the christenings stop four years before Matthew’s birth at Portsmouth.

Birth and death

Austin gives her birth as 1604 and her death as 15 July 1688. Hattie Borden Weld’s Borden genealogy (1899) gives her death as 16 July 1688, at the age of 84 years and 6 months, and from that age reckons her birth as 15 February 1604.

The will

The provisions for Joan are from Austin’s and Weld’s abstracts of Richard’s will, made by the town council of Portsmouth on 31 May 1671 and approved as his will, according to Weld, on 11 July 1671. Weld’s statement that Matthew was the first English child born on the island is the book’s own account, attributed to the Friends’ records but not quoted from them.