♀Martha White

Martha White (living in 1649) was an Oxfordshire gentleman’s daughter who married William Cooke, the Puritan vicar of Crediton, in Devon, and was left a widow with young children when he died in 1615. She was a sister of John White^W, the Dorchester minister who helped to found the Massachusetts Bay Company, and he was one of the two men her husband chose to watch over his will. She later married again, to a man named Moore. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Elizabeth Cooke.

Marriage

Martha was a daughter of John White of Stanton St. John, in Oxfordshire, a gentleman, and his wife Isabel Bawle. William Cooke and Martha White were married at Stockton, in Wiltshire, on 27 April 1597. The rector of Stockton, John Terry, was the husband of Martha’s sister Mary.

Her husband had been vicar of Crediton since 1596, and the couple lived in the vicarage there, a thatched house that the parish governors were forever repairing. In 1613 they paid back “Mrs. Cooke” what “she had laid out for read and thatchinge of her howse”.

William and Martha had seven children, all apparently born at Crediton: four daughters, Elizabeth, Susanna, Mary and Martha, and three sons. Their first son, Nathaniel, was buried in 1603, a second Nathaniel was baptized on the same day as Susanna, and Samuel seems to have died young.

Widowhood

William died early in 1615. His will, dated 7 February 1614/5, made Martha his sole executrix and charged her with the children’s education until they came of age. It left her the house, which she might “either sell or keepe at her owne pleasure”, and the £100 of her marriage portion that her father still held. Each daughter was to forfeit her share if she married “contrary to her mothers likinge” before the age of twenty-one. In his own will, dated 30 September 1616, her father left £20 to “my daughter Martha Cooke”.

The governors paid her rent for her house in 1616 and 1617, and she later seems to have let it to Richard Cole. In 1620, still “Mrs Cooke widow”, she received a benevolence of £5 from them. By 1627 she had married a man named Moore, whose first name is not known, and the governors’ accounts that year pay “Mrs Moore olim Mrs Cooke”, formerly Mrs Cooke. Her brother Stephen named “my sister Martha Moore” in his will of 13 November 1629, and her sister Mary Terry named her in hers in 1637. Martha sold the Crediton house in 1639.

The last record of her is the will of her brother John White, which left his sister Martha Moore 20 shillings. The records do not show when or where she died.

Notes

Sources

Her marriages and her years at Crediton come from Harold F. Porter, Jr., “Mr. William Cooke, Father-in-Law of Mr. William Walton of Marblehead, Massachusetts,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 142 (1988): 361-368. Porter prints the Stockton register entry of the marriage (“Guilielmus Cooke cler. et Martha White filia Joh’is White de Stanton St. Joh’is”), William Cooke’s will, and extracts from the accounts of the Twelve Governors of Crediton, which he calls incomplete and “the main source for what is known” of her widowhood. The second marriage falls between 1620 and 1627 on the evidence of those accounts; no record of it is known. Her father’s will, dated 30 September 1616 and proved at Oxford on 26 September 1618, is transcribed by the Oxfordshire Family History Society. Her brother Stephen’s will is from Michael Russell’s pages on the White family for the Fordington, Dorset, online parish clerks.

Her brother’s will

Porter dates John White’s will 29 March 1648/9 and says she was living then. A date in late March is not usually written double, since the new year began on 25 March, and John White is generally said to have died in July 1648, so the will may belong to March 1648.