♀Margaret (surname unknown)

Margaret (buried 22 March 1630/31) was the wife of William Goodrich, a yeoman of Hessett, a farming parish a few miles east of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England, and the mother of six children. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son John Goodrich (died 1632).

Family

Her maiden name is not known for certain. She was probably the Margaret Richardson who married a William Goodrich at Felsham, Suffolk, in 1568, and if so the marriage lasted more than sixty years. She is said to have been a daughter of Alexander Richardson and his wife Isabel.

She and William had six children, John, Robert, William, Henry, Susan and Elizabeth. Robert, William, Henry and Susan were baptized at Hessett between 1577 and 1591.

Death

Margaret was buried at Hessett on 22 March 1630/31^W. Less than two weeks later, on 4 April 1631, William made his will. It names no wife, and it left all his houses and lands at Hessett to their son John. William was buried at Hessett on 24 October 1631, seven months after her. John, a clothier in Bury St Edmunds, was buried at Bury on 21 April 1632, so that within thirteen months Margaret, her husband and the son who had inherited the family’s houses had all died.

Notes

Where she is known from

Margaret is known from Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), p. 551, which condenses Mary Lovering Holman’s 1948 study of the family’s English records. It gives William Goodrich’s wife only as Margaret, with her burial at Hessett, and lists the six children as William’s and hers, with the Hessett baptisms of Robert, William, Henry and Susan. It puts John’s birth at about 1575 and gives no baptism for him or for Elizabeth. The register entries are known only as the compilers print them.

William’s will of 4 April 1631 is known from the abstract printed by Lafayette Wallace Case in The Goodrich Family in America (1889), p. 19. It names his sons John and William and his daughters Elizabeth and Susan, but no wife, and neither Robert nor Henry.

Her maiden name and parents

The 1952 genealogy thinks it “quite likely” that William was the man who married Margaret Richardson at Felsham, Suffolk, in 1568, and it heads the list of the couple’s children with a question mark before the name Richardson. No record ties Margaret of Hessett to the Felsham marriage. WikiTree gives her parents as Alexander Richardson and Isabel, but no record names her parents.