♀Margaret Northend

Margaret Northend (about 1620 – 20 February 1705/6) was the wife of John Palmer, a farmer and militia sergeant of Rowley, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and lived in that town as wife and widow for more than half a century. In 1675 she and her husband testified in court for the uncle who had broken off their daughter Hannah’s engagement. She was most likely the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Francis Palmer (1657–1733).

Yorkshire

Margaret was probably born at Hunsley, in Yorkshire, about 1620, and was most likely a daughter of John Northend, lord of the manor of Hunsley, and his wife Elizabeth. Her father made his will on 8 October 1625 and was dead by 19 November, when it was proved. To pay his debts and raise portions for his younger children, Margaret among them, he put meadow and woodland at South Cave in trust with his brother Robert Northend and with the minister who would lead the founders of Rowley, Massachusetts, to New England: Ezekiel Rogers^W, then rector of Rowley in Yorkshire. In 1638 Rogers sailed with a company of his parishioners, and the next spring they settled the town in which Margaret would spend her married life.

Marriage

Her brother Ezekiel Northend also lived at Rowley. John Palmer and Margaret Northend are said to have married at Rowley on 14 July 1650. John was a widower with a daughter, Hannah, not yet three; his first wife, Ruth Acy, is said to have been buried the previous October, six days after the birth of a son who did not survive infancy. John and Margaret had four children at Rowley: Elizabeth in 1652, John in 1656, who died at the age of two, Francis in 1657 and Sarah in 1661.

In 1678 her brother Anthony Northend wrote from Beverley, in Yorkshire, to Ezekiel that it was “very welcome news” to hear “that you and your wife my Sisters & their husbands were alive with all your children”.

The Acy case of 1675

At a Rowley town meeting in the winter of 1674/5, John Pickard said that John Acy had “ruined” four people, Hannah Palmer among them. Acy sued him for defamation at the Ipswich court in March 1675, and the depositions tell Hannah’s story. John Hopkinson had courted her, and a witness was at John Palmer’s house when breaking off the match was discussed. Her uncle, John Acy, pressed her to hand over the love tokens Hopkinson had given her, which she called the only comforts she had in his absence, and promised to return them in a week; instead he sent them back to Hopkinson. He promised her ten pounds at her marriage if she would give the match up, and gave her a coat. Both she and Hopkinson, the witness said, were much dejected.

John and Margaret took the uncle’s side. They swore that they had never heard their daughter say anything against him, and that “any good that he could doe her by night or by day he would redily and willingly haue done it”. The jury, sent out a second time, found for Acy.

Widowhood

On 23 August 1693 John made his will. Margaret was to have his household goods for life and the east end of the house, provided she took no one to live with her “Except my sone francis”. Francis, who was to inherit the rest, had to “maintain my beloved wife comfortably and honourably during her natural Life”, and if he did not, she was free to sell land for her keep. One of the overseers was “my brother Ezekiel Northend”.

John Palmer died at Rowley on 17 June 1695. Margaret outlived him by more than ten years. She died at Rowley on 20 February 1705/6, and the town’s records enter her death as that of “The Widow aged Sister Palmer”.

Notes

Sources

Her birth at Hunsley about 1620, her parents, the marriage date, the births of her children and her death come from Mary Lovering Holman’s Ancestry of Charles Stinson Pillsbury and John Sargent Pillsbury (1938), vol. 2, pp. 913–915 and 947–949, a compiled genealogy, which also quotes John Palmer’s will from the Essex County probate files. Holman quotes the Rowley entry of her death; it gives no first name, and Holman takes it as hers. The birth of her son John in 1656, entered as “son of John and Margaret”, and the Acy case are in George Francis Dow’s printed Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, vols. 2 and 6.

Her family in Yorkshire

Holman draws the Northend family from a published abstract of her father’s will, proved in the Exchequer Court of York, which names his sons Anthony and Ezechiell and his daughters Elizabeth, Alice, Margaret and Joane, and from Anthony Northend’s letter of 1678, printed in the Essex Institute Historical Collections, vol. 12, p. 72. Holman gives the mother as Elizabeth, perhaps a Johnson. John Palmer’s will calls Ezekiel Northend “my brother”, which fits Margaret being Ezekiel’s sister; Holman has Ezekiel born about 1621–22 and coming to New England probably about 1645. When and how Margaret crossed the Atlantic is not recorded.

Hannah

The court record calls Hannah “their daughter”. By Holman’s account she was John’s daughter by his first wife, Ruth Acy, born on 1 September 1647, and she was buried at Rowley on 25 October 1670, some years before the case was heard. John Acy, her uncle, was most likely Ruth’s brother.

The line of descent

The line runs through her son Francis Palmer. The next step, from Francis to the John Palmer who married Mary Stickney at Rowley in 1709, rests on an online genealogy and is not proved, so the relationship above is given as most likely.