♀Margery How

Margery How (died 1632) was the wife of John Goodrich, a clothier of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, England, where she died. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son William Goodrich (1622–1676), one of the early settlers of Wethersfield, Connecticut.

Marriage and family

According to a compiled genealogy published in 1952, John Goodrich and Margery How were married in St James’ parish, Bury St Edmunds, on 7 August 1615. The same compilation lists five sons, John, William “the elder”, Henry, William “the younger” and Jeremy, of whom Henry died as an infant in 1619 and Jeremy died young. As the compilers summarize John’s will, two of the sons living in 1632 were both called William, told apart as “the elder” and “the younger”; the records do not explain why the name was given twice.

Her parents are not known. The compilation records that a sister of hers was the mother of Jane Coates, whose husband, Henry Bull of Bury, later wrote to Jane’s Goodrich “cousins” in New England and kept them informed of their inheritance in England. In July 1678 Bull wrote to his “Cozen Goodrich” in Connecticut that their brother William, the clergyman of Hessett, had died “and left no children”.

Death

Her husband made his will on 14 April 1632, leaving her, as the compilation summarizes it, his house in Bury and certain lands for her life and naming her sole executrix; he died a week later, on 21 April. By the compilation’s account Margery died within weeks of her husband, before the will was proved on 16 May 1632, and the estate was administered by the brothers Thomas and Clement Chaplin, two of the four men of Bury he had named as supervisors.

All four of her surviving sons were then under twenty-one. The compilation adds that Clement Chaplin, having settled the estate, went to New England in 1635, and its authors judge that “It was doubtless this connection which led the Goodrich brothers to emigrate.” Two of the orphaned sons, John and the younger William, were settled at Wethersfield in the 1640s, while the elder William, according to the same account, entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1634 and became minister of Hessett.

Notes

The English account

Everything above about her marriage, children and death rests on Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), which condenses the English ancestry given by Mary Lovering Holman in 1948. The parish registers and the 1632 will themselves have not been seen; the will, as the compilers quote it, spells her name Margerie and Margarie. The compilation dates her death only as between 14 April and 16 May 1632.

Her son John

The 1952 compilers give the son John’s birth only as after 1611, perhaps 1615 or 1616. Holman thought him a son by an earlier marriage; the compilers think that possible but not necessary, since the first two children of a marriage were often born close together and John may even have been a twin of the elder William.