♀Martha Timbrell

Martha Timbrell (died 1625 or 1626) married John Washburn, a yeoman of Bengeworth, in the borough of Evesham, Worcestershire, and was the mother of the John Washburn who later settled in Plymouth Colony^W. Her brother John Timbrell signed her blind husband’s will for him in 1624, and a year later she left the rest of her goods at his disposal. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son John Washburn (died about 1671).

Marriage and family

She was probably born a Timbrell. She married John Washburn at Bengeworth on 6 July 1596. Their son John was baptized there on 2 July 1597, and Jane, William and Joane followed by 1604.

Widowhood and death

Her husband, blind and sick, made his will on 4 August 1624 and was buried the next day. He left her all the household goods, and made her consent, with John Timbrell’s, a condition of their daughter Joane’s marriage portion.

On 29 September 1625 she made her own will as a widow, “beinge verie weake & sicke in body”. She gave Joane “all the nue clouth and the best of all my houshns stufe” and left the rest “to be at my brouther John Tembrel dispousing”. Three women witnessed it: Ales Watsone, Ales Orwaye and Annes Hale. Her goods, among them a featherbed, eighteen pewter platters, six candlesticks and sheets of holland, flaxen and hempen linen, were valued at £24 13s 8d by John Timbrell, Richard Moore and Richarde Haye, and the will was proved at Worcester on 9 May 1626, by which time she had died.

Notes

Sources

Her life rests on James Davenport’s The Washbourne Family of Little Washbourne and Wichenford (1907), which prints the Washbourne entries of the Bengeworth register, her husband’s will of 1624, and her own will and inventory from the probate registry at Worcester. She died between making her will on 29 September 1625 and its proof on 9 May 1626; Davenport gives no closer date. The godmother entries name only “Martha Wasborne”; Davenport’s Bengeworth entries show no other Martha Wasborne before the daughters of her son William in the 1630s.

Her surname

Her husband’s will calls John Timbrell “my Brother in Law”, and her own will calls the same man “my brouther John Tembrel”, so Timbrell is taken here as her birth name. Davenport calls her Martha Stevens, and Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins (1995) gives her as “Martha (Timbrell) (Stephens)”, which would make Stephens the name of an earlier husband. The 1596 marriage entry is damaged after the first letters of her name.