♀Juliana Carpenter

Juliana Carpenter (about 1583 – 19 February 1664) was a woman from Bath in England who married the merchant George Morton at Leiden in Holland, came with him to Plymouth Colony^W, and lived there for forty years after his death. When she died, a widow for the second time, the colony’s register gave her age as “fourscore and one yeare” and called her “a faithfull servant of God”. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through her daughter Sarah Morton (born about 1620) and her son Ephraim Morton (born about 1623).

Bath and Leiden

She was probably the Julian Carpenter, daughter of Alexander Carpenter, who was baptized at Bath in Somerset on 7 March 1582/83. Her father had left England for Holland: an “Alexander Carpenter from Wrington” witnessed a marriage at Amsterdam in December 1600, and he was living at Leiden by 1611.

When she was betrothed at Leiden in 1612 she was a “maid from Bath in England”, accompanied by her father and her sister Alice. She married George Morton, a merchant “from York in England”, at Leiden on 22 July 1612. Five children followed: Nathaniel, Patience, John, Sarah and Ephraim, the youngest of whom is said to have been born on the voyage to New England in 1623.

Plymouth

She most likely sailed with George and the children in the Anne^W in 1623. Her sister Alice, the widow of Edward Southworth, came in the same ship and married Governor William Bradford^W at Plymouth on 14 August 1623. George died at Plymouth in June 1624, not a full year after he came ashore, and left her with five children.

By 1627 Juliana had married Manasseh Kempton, who had also come in the Anne. In the division of the colony’s cattle that year she, her new husband and four of her children, Nathaniel, John, Ephraim and Patience, were joined to the lot of Governor Bradford, her sister Alice’s husband, while Sarah was placed with Francis Eaton’s company. The Bradford lot drew a heifer from the great white-backed cow that had been brought over in the Anne, and two she-goats.

Manasseh, a yeoman of Plymouth, gave land to her family: on 5 January 1637/38 he made over to her son Nathaniel Morton, and to John Faunce, the husband of her daughter Patience, the twenty-acre lots on which each of them was then living. He died on 14 January 1662/63, and the register wrote of him that he “did much good in his place the time God lent him”. Juliana died at Plymouth on 19 February 1664 and was buried the next day.

Lines of descent

The two lines run separately through the Mortons of Plymouth and meet again in James Morton (1739–1810): his father, James Morton (1714–1745), descended from Ephraim, and his mother, Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797), from Sarah.

Notes

Her baptism

The baptism at Bath on 7 March 1582/83 of “Julian Carpenter”, with her father named as Alexander Carpenter, is known only from an index of Somerset church records. It fits the Leiden record’s “maid from Bath” and her age at death. Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration Begins warns that index entries published for this family in 1988 were in many cases not taken from the parish registers, and that a later search of the registers of St James, Bath, and of Wrington is more reliable but leaves some discrepancies. Anderson himself places her birth only “say 1583”, from her age at death.

The year of her death

The register enters her death on “the 19th day of February, anno Domini 1664”, in a year that then began in late March, so by the modern calendar she died in February 1665; Anderson’s sketch of Manasseh Kempton writes the date 19 February 1664/5. A 1909 history of Maine families gives 18 February 1665, “in the eighty-first year of her age”.

Her sisters

Anderson, following Mary Lovering Holman’s Scott Genealogy, counts five Carpenter sisters who came to New England or married men who did: Juliana; Agnes, the second wife of Samuel Fuller; Alice, wife of Edward Southworth and then of William Bradford; Mary, who died at Plymouth unmarried in 1687 “in 91 year”; and Priscilla, wife of William Wright and then of John Cooper. In a letter of 1644 or 1646 to Mary, then at Wrington, Bradford wrote that their mother had recently died; her name is not known. The Leiden betrothal record names Alice as Juliana’s sister; that she is the Alice who married Bradford is Anderson’s account.

Her second marriage and Ephraim’s birth

Anderson dates her marriage to Manasseh Kempton before 22 May 1627, the date of the cattle division. The 1623 list of land for the Anne’s passengers names “Manasseh & John Fance” together and names George Morton without his wife or children. The 1909 history alone says that Ephraim was born on the ship; Anderson gives his birth only as by 1623.