♀Joan Hurst

Joan Hurst (baptised 13 March 1567/68 – early 1621) was an Englishwoman of Henlow^W in Bedfordshire, the wife of John Tilley^W, with whom she sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 with their youngest daughter; she and her husband both died at Plymouth in the first winter. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Elizabeth Tilley (1607–1687).

Henlow

Governor William Bradford^W, who listed the passengers, never gives her name: she appears in his list only as John Tilley’s “wife”. Her name, her baptism and both of her marriages come from the parish register of Henlow, as set out by Robert Leigh Ward in a 1976 study of the Tilley family’s English origins. Susan E. Roser’s Mayflower Increasings (1995), drawing on that study, gives her baptism at Henlow on 13 March 1567/68, as the daughter of William and Rose Hurst.

Roser records that she first married Thomas Rogers at Henlow on 18 June 1593, that their daughter Joan was baptised there on 26 May 1594, and that Thomas died about 1594 or 1595. She adds that no connection has been found between this Thomas Rogers and the Thomas Rogers who later sailed on the Mayflower.

As the widow Joan Rogers she married John Tilley at Henlow on 20 September 1596. He had been baptised in the same parish on 19 December 1571, the son of Robert and Elizabeth Tilley. Elizabeth Pearson White’s volume on John Howland in the Mayflower Families series describes him as a silk-weaver. Five children of the marriage were baptised at Henlow between 1597 and 1607; of the four older ones nothing further is recorded. The youngest, Elizabeth, was baptised on 30 August 1607. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins gives Leiden^W in Holland, where the English separatist congregation had been living in exile, as the place from which the family emigrated.

The Mayflower and Plymouth

Bradford’s list names “John Tilley and his wife, and Elizabeth their daughter” among the passengers of 1620; Elizabeth was the only one of the couple’s children recorded as coming with them. John’s younger brother Edward Tilley^W sailed on the same ship with his wife and two young cousins in their care. At Cape Cod, John was one of the ten men who set out on 6 December 1620 under Myles Standish to explore the coast, a trip made in bitter cold.

About half of the company died in the sickness of the first winter, and the Tilleys were among them. Bradford wrote that “John Tilley and his wife both died a little after they came ashore”, and Edward and his wife died at about the same time. Roser places Joan’s death between January and April 1621. Elizabeth, then thirteen, was left in the colony without her parents. A Howland family history of 1885, quoted by White, places her afterwards in Governor John Carver’s household, which after the Carvers died in the spring of 1621 was headed by their servant John Howland, whom she later married. Bradford closed his note on the family with the words: “And their daughter Elizabeth married with John Howland and hath issue”.

Notes

White places Henlow in Huntingdonshire; it is in Bedfordshire, as Anderson and Roser give it.