♀Joan (surname unknown)

Joan (living in 1626) was a woman of Netherbury, in Dorset, England, who married Thomas Cooke and afterwards Thomas Tackle, and who as a widow held a cottage on the manor of Yondover in that parish. She was probably the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through her son Thomas Cook (died 1674).

Marriages

Her surname and her family are not known. She is thought to have married Thomas Cooke, as his second wife, at Netherbury before 1600. The parish clerks wrote him down sometimes as Cooke and sometimes as Bowcher, Bocher or Butcher, and on 23 April 1600 a son, Thomas, was baptized there as the son of Thomas Bowcher; he was most likely her child.

Thomas Cooke was probably the Thomas Butcher buried at Netherbury on 20 May 1614, when their son was fourteen. Joan married Thomas Tackle at Netherbury on 2 February 1614/5, entered in the register as Joanna Cooke, widow. Thomas Tackle was buried there on 19 April 1626.

Widowhood

Later in 1626 the manor of Yondover, in Netherbury, was surveyed, and the survey is the one document that names her as a mother. It records that “the Widdow Tackle holdeth one cottage & one garden”, for a rent of eight pence a year and free of any heriot^W, and names “Her sonn Thomas Cooke” as the tenant in reversion^W, the one who would take the holding after her. The holding seems to have come to her through her first husband, which would explain why it was to pass to his son rather than to anyone of the Tackle family. The date of her death is not known.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Thomas Cook, who most likely went to New England by 1637 and settled at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1643. From him they pass to her grandson John Cook (1630–1691), to John’s son John Cook (1656–1737) and to that John’s daughter Ruth Cook, two of whose children carried them on. The lines meet again in Salena Sherman (1806–1842), whose parents Waite Allen (1766–1850) and Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) both descend from Joan, and through her both lines come down to Roger.

Notes

Her identification

What is known of her is set out by Jane Fletcher Fiske in Thomas Cooke of Rhode Island, volume 1 (1987), pp. 4–5 and 11. Fiske suggests that the Joanna Cooke, widow, who married Thomas Tackle was the widow of the Thomas Butcher buried in 1614, and that the Thomas Cooke of the 1626 survey was the Thomas baptized in 1600, the man who settled in Rhode Island; she calls it “more than likely” that the 1600 baptism is his. Fiske quotes the survey from the Dorset Record Office (7623). The baptismal registers do not give mothers’ names, so the survey is the only link between Joan and her son.

Her marriages

No record of her marriage to Thomas Cooke is known, under any spelling of his names, and her maiden name is unknown. Fiske dates the marriage to 1599, after the burial of a wife of Thomas Bowcher on 8 January 1598/9, whom she takes to be his first wife; it is given here as before 1600, the year of the baptism. Fiske found no children of the Tackle marriage and no probate for the couple, and no record of Joan’s death.