♀Joan (surname unknown)

Joan is said to have been the wife of Lancelot Ward of Wethersfield, in Essex, England, and the mother of their daughter Philippa, who married Samuel Sherman of Dedham about 1598. Her maiden name is not known. She was probably the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Philippa Ward.

Lancelot was dead by 8 January 1616/7, when his son Robert Ward of Lexden, near Colchester, made his will. Lancelot’s widow was still living. Robert’s wife was to pay her thirteen pounds six shillings and eight pence a year out of the Wethersfield lands, in satisfaction of her dower^W. Robert called her “my mother in law, the late wife of my father Lancelot Ward” and did not give her name. In the usage of the time those words meant a stepmother. Whether that widow was Joan, or Joan was an earlier wife and Robert’s own mother, the will does not show.

Notes

Her name and her daughter

Joan’s name comes from Michael Johnson Wood, “The Earliest Shermans of Dedham, Essex, and Their Wives” (New England Historical and Genealogical Register 167 (2013): 35–54), which gives Samuel Sherman’s wife as “PHILLIPP WARD, born say 1575, daughter of Lancelot and Joan (____) Ward of Wethersfield, Essex”, married about 1598 (167:47). Bertha Stratton’s Transatlantic Shermans (1969) also makes Philippa a daughter of Lancelot Ward, though her own pedigree chart writes the father as “Lancelot Ward?”, and does not name his wife. No record names Philippa as Lancelot’s daughter. Wood’s case rests on two wills. Robert Ward’s will is witnessed by “Phellep Shearman”, whom Wood calls “almost certainly the testator’s sister”; the will itself names no sister and does not call the witness kin. The 1652 will of John Ward of Ipswich, Massachusetts, names “cousin Samuel Sherman of Boston, deceased and cousin Philip Sherman of Rhode Island”, two of Philippa’s sons. If Joan was the widow of Robert’s will, Philippa could still have been her daughter and Robert’s half-sister.

Robert Ward’s will

Robert Ward of Lexden’s will, dated 8 January 1616 and proved 9 May 1617, is abstracted in Henry F. Waters, Genealogical Gleanings in England, vol. 2 (1901), pp. 1144–45; Wood dates it 8 January 1616/7. The yearly payment to Lancelot’s widow was made “according to a grant thereof made by me in satisfaction of her dower out of said lands and tenements”.