♀Margaret (surname unknown)

Margaret (living in 1556) was a woman of Henlow in Bedfordshire, England, who married Thomas Tylle, a householder there. She was the thirteenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son William Tilly (buried 1578/79).

Margaret’s family is not known. Thomas and Margaret had a son, William, and a daughter, Agnes. Thomas is said to have made his will on 21 August 1556, leaving the house to William as his heir and remembering Margaret and Agnes, who by then had children of her own. The will was proved on 6 October 1556, so Margaret was a widow by that autumn. Through William, she was probably the great-grandmother of John Tilley^W and Edward Tilley^W, two brothers who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. John’s daughter Elizabeth married John Howland, and Roger’s line runs through her.

Notes

Where she is known from

Margaret is known only from her husband’s will (made 21 August 1556, proved 6 October 1556 in the court of the Archdeaconry of Bedford), as transcribed by Robert Leigh Ward in The American Genealogist^W, volume 52 (1976), page 200, and quoted on WikiTree. No record names her surname, her parents or her burial. Surnames offered for her in online family trees have no source behind them.

Her children

The will names Margaret as Thomas’s wife and names two children, William and Agnes, but does not say that Margaret was their mother. Thomas’s father’s will, made in 1520, already speaks of “the children of Thomas Tilly”, so Thomas had a family more than thirty years before he died; whether Margaret was the mother of those children, or a later wife, the records do not say.