♀Margaret (surname unknown)

Margaret (died 1629) was the wife of Henry Howland, a yeoman of Fenstanton in Huntingdonshire, and the mother of John Howland, who crossed on the Mayflower in 1620 in the household of John Carver and lived to be the last man of that company left at Plymouth. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son John Howland (died 1673).

Her maiden name and her parents are not known, and no record of her marriage or of her own baptism has been found. What is known of her comes from Elizabeth Pearson White’s volume on John Howland in the Mayflower Families series, which records that she was buried at Fenstanton on 31 July 1629, and that her husband died there nearly six years later, on 17 May 1635. White identifies the family through the probate records of John’s brother Humphrey Howland, a London draper, whose will of 1646 names his brothers Arthur, John and Henry and a sister Margaret, the wife of Richard Phillips, a Fenstanton shoemaker; Susan E. Roser’s Mayflower Increasings (1995) gives the same parentage. The will names the father’s children but not their mother, so it is not recorded whether Margaret was the mother of all of them. Her son John had left for London before 1620, and she did not live to see his brothers Henry and Arthur follow him to Plymouth Colony in the 1630s.