♀Joanna Treat

Joanna Treat (baptised 24 May 1618 – October 1694) was an English-born woman of colonial Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony^W, the wife of John Hollister. Her mother, Alice Treat, and a “Joana Hollister” both appear among the women church members who signed the Wethersfield petition of August 1658 against the town’s minister. She was a sister of Honor Treat (1616–1690), the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), and a daughter of Richard Treat and Alice Gaylard.

Pitminster

She was the daughter of Richard Treat and Alice Gaylard, who married at Pitminster, in Somerset, England, in 1615. The Treat Family (1893), a compiled genealogy that prints the baptisms of the children born at Pitminster, gives her baptism there on 24 May 1618, after her sister Honor and before her sister Sarah. The family later settled at Wethersfield, on the Connecticut River.

Wethersfield

Nathaniel Goodwin’s Genealogical Notes (1856) says that John Hollister, one of the first settlers of Wethersfield, married Joanna Treat, daughter of Richard Treat. The Treat Family likewise lists her as the wife of John Hollister. No record of the marriage itself has been found.

The petition of 17 August 1658 to the colony’s General Court, as Henry Stiles’s history of the town prints it, lists the church members by name, and the men, headed by John Hollister, come first. Among the women are “Alice Treat” and “Joana Hollister”. The wife of John Hollister is most likely the Joanna Treat of Pitminster; the petition does not say so.

John Hollister made his will on 3 April 1665, and in the digest of early Connecticut probate records it gives “my wife Joana Hollister” his house and home lot in Wethersfield. Goodwin gives his death as April 1665. Her father’s will, dated 13 February 1668/69, leaves “my daughter Hollister” forty shillings; it does not give her first name, and that daughter is taken to be Joanna, the wife of John Hollister.

Goodwin writes that his widow, Mrs. Joanna Hollister, died in October 1694, and The Treat Family gives the same month and year. Neither gives a day or a place, and no other record of her death has been found.