♀Johan (surname unknown)

Johan (living in 1554) was the wife of Reinold Marvin, a yeoman of Ramsey in Essex, England, and the mother of his six children. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Edward Marvin (about 1552–1615). When her husband made his will, he left the whole of his estate in her hands for her lifetime and named her sole executrix.

Marriage and widowhood

Her surname is not known. Reinold and Johan had six children, all under age when he made his will in December 1554: three sons, Richard, Edward and John, and three daughters, Audrey, Margery and Barbara. He left Johan all his houses and lands for her lifetime, “to kepe my chyldren & hyrs withall tell they be abell to helpe themselfs,” together with the ewes on his farm of “east Haull & the Ray & Barwycke” and the rest of his goods, and made her sole executrix.

She was to keep the houses in repair and the lands fenced, and to make no waste of the timber and woods. If Johan married again, she was first to be bound to his brothers John and Thomas Mervyn, with two sureties, for the children’s portions, or else to hand those portions over to them. After her death the houses and lands were to pass to the three sons. Johan evidently outlived her husband, who died before October 1561.

Notes

Her name

Reinold’s will, dated 22 December 1554, calls her “Johan my wyfe”; Johan is an old spelling of Joan. The will is known from the full transcript printed in William T. R. Marvin, The English Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin of Hartford (1900), pp. 78-79. Neither that book nor John Insley Coddington’s “Notes on the Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin”, The American Genealogist 18 (1941), gives her surname. Some online family trees call her Johanna Fisher, with no source.

Widowhood

Both the 1900 book and Coddington state that she survived Reinold, as the executrix of his will. Whether she married again is not known.