♀Margaret (surname unknown)

Margaret (died after 1533) was the wife of John Mervyn, a wealthy yeoman of Ramsey in Essex, England, who at his death in 1533 left her all his houses and lands in Ramsey, with the household stuff, the cattle and horses and a hundred sheep, and named her one of the executors of his will. She was the twelfth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Reinold Marvin (born about 1513).

Family

Margaret’s maiden name is not known. She and John had eight children: five sons, John, Reinold, Thomas, Richard and John the younger, and three daughters, Margaret, Christian and Marion. Two of the sons were named John, and the will told them apart as the eldest and “the younger.” She was probably the mother of all of them. In 1533 the eldest John was of age, while Reinold, Thomas and Richard were still under twenty-one.

Widowhood

John made his will on 16 September 1533. To his wife Margaret he left all his houses and lands in Ramsey, copyhold^W and freehold, with the household stuff, £20, ten milch beasts, two couple of oxen, four cart horses with their harness, cart and plow, and a hundred sheep. Most of the land was to pass to the sons only after her death: the eldest John was then to have the house the family lived in, Reinold the tenement called Bennettes, and Thomas the tenement called Rolfes. John died that autumn, and on 17 December 1533 Margaret and the eldest John proved the will in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W.

She was probably the “Widow Marvin” who was taxed 15s. on her movables at Ramsey in the Lay Subsidy of 1540. When she died is not known.

Notes

Sources

Margaret is known from her husband’s will, in the abstract printed by John Insley Coddington in “Notes on the Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin,” The American Genealogist 18 (1941), pages 3 to 5, and from Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), pages 712 and 713, which follows it. The will names her as wife and executor, and she was living when it was proved on 17 December 1533.

Her children

Coddington wrote that “from the terms of the will, it is obvious that she was the mother of all his children,” and the 1952 study agrees; the conclusion rests on the way the will provides for her and the children. The order of the children is uncertain.

The widow of 1540

The tax entry for “Widow Marvin” at Ramsey is printed in William T. R. Marvin’s The English Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin (1900). Coddington judged that she was “undoubtedly” Margaret, and the 1952 study repeats this.

Her surname

No record or published study names her family. Some online family trees call her Margaret Rose Smythe or Rose Smyth, but give no source for the name.