♀Joan West

Joan West (about 1631 – 24 April 1676) was the first wife of Joshua Coggeshall of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and the mother of his seven eldest children. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son John Coggeshall (1659–1727).

Life

She married Joshua Coggeshall, son of the colony’s first president John Coggeshall, on 22 December 1652. A family genealogy of 1930 says they were married at the Newport house of Peter Easton, whose wife Anne was Joshua’s sister. Their children, born between 1655 and 1672, were Mary, Joshua, John, Josiah, Daniel, Humility and Caleb.

She died at Portsmouth on 24 April 1676. She was twenty-one when she married, which puts her birth about 1631.

Notes

The 1930 genealogy and Austin’s dictionary of Rhode Island families (1887) name her father as Matthew West of Newport. Both are compilations, and no record naming her parents is known.

Age and death

The Friends’ register gives her age at the marriage as twenty-one (Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, vol. 7, p. 11), and places her death at Portsmouth on 24 April 1676 (vol. 7, p. 95). Savage’s dictionary of 1860 gives her age at death as forty-one, which would put her birth about 1635. The 1930 genealogy gives forty-five, about 1631.