♂Jonathan Holmes

Jonathan Holmes (5 July 1709 – 5 August 1787) was a man of Plymouth and Kingston in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, a great-great-grandson of the Mayflower passenger William Brewster through his mother. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Mary Holmes (born 1745).

Early life

Jonathan Holmes was born at Plymouth on 5 July 1709; the Plymouth town book enters him among the children of “Joseph Holmes & Mary his wife”. His parents were Joseph Holmes (1665–1733) and Mary Brewster (1678–1761), a great-granddaughter of Elder Brewster. According to a Brewster family genealogy published in 1908, he grew up on the farm near the Plymouth line that his father took in 1713 in an exchange with his mother’s brother, Wrestling Brewster; that part of Plymouth became the town of Kingston in 1726. His father died there in 1733, and his mother lived on at Kingston until 1761.

Marriage and family

On 27 October 1733 their intention of marriage was entered at Plympton, she as of Plympton and he as of Kingston. On 3 January 1734 he married Mary Waterman (1716–1749/50) at Kingston. She was a daughter of Robert Waterman of Plympton and his first wife, Mary Cushman. Two and a half years earlier, on 20 May 1731, “Joseph (of Kingston)” had married her sister Rebeckah Waterman at Plympton; a compilation of the Mayflower Society identifies him as Jonathan’s brother. The children of the two couples were therefore cousins twice over, through both their fathers and their mothers, and through the Cushman line both sets also descended from Isaac Allerton, another Mayflower passenger. In 1763 Jonathan’s son Jonathan married his first cousin Rebecca Holmes, the daughter of Joseph and Rebeckah.

The Kingston town clerk entered the children of “Johnathan Holmes and Mary his wife”: six, born between October 1734 and February 1748/49, among them a son, Charles, who lived eight days in August 1741. Mary Waterman died at Kingston in January 1749/50, about eleven months after the birth of the youngest, Jedediah. Three of the sons, Jonathan, Robert and Jedediah, stayed at Kingston and were buried there. The daughter Mary married James Morton at Plympton in 1766 and moved with him to Chesterfield, in the hills of western Massachusetts.

On 19 December 1752 Holmes married again at Kingston, to Rebecca Tilden. She is the Rebeccah whom his will names as his wife in 1772. No children of that marriage are on record.

Will and death

Jonathan Holmes signed his will on 10 September 1772, naming “my wife Rebeccah Holmes”. It was not proved for another fifteen years. He died at Kingston on 5 August 1787, aged 78; the town record gives the cause as “dropsy and asthma”. Dropsy was the period’s word for swelling from fluid in the body. The will was proved on 3 September 1787 and left a legacy of £13 6s 8d to “my Daughter Mary Morton”. The Plympton record of the 1766 marriage does not name the bride’s father, so this legacy is the record that ties the Chesterfield family to him. He was buried in the Old Burying Ground at Kingston, behind the First Church.

Notes

The Kingston register does not itself give his first wife’s maiden name. In the earlier copy of the family entry she is only “Mary his wife”; in a later copy “Waterman” was written above her name in another hand. The identification also rests on a genealogy of the Waterman family and on the Plympton record of her sister’s marriage to Joseph Holmes, and the three agree.

The second marriage is in the Kingston register, and the minister’s return printed in The Genealogical Advertiser, vol. 3 (1900), lists both parties as of Kingston. The Rebeccah of the 1772 will is taken to be the same woman. The Kingston vital records name a widow of Jonathan Holmes, Rebecca, who died on 12 December 1791; the son Jonathan lived until 1806, so that widow was the father’s.

The church record of his death gives his age as 82; his gravestone gives 78, which agrees with the birth date of 5 July 1709.