♀Mary Allerton

Mary Allerton (about 1617 – 28 November 1699) was a child passenger on the Mayflower who spent the rest of her long life at Plymouth, and who, when she died there in 1699, was the last of the Mayflower passengers still living. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Isaac Cushman (1648–1732).

Leiden and the crossing

She was born about 1617 at Leiden in Holland, the daughter of Isaac Allerton (1586–1659) and Mary Norris (died 1621), members of the English separatist congregation that had settled there. Her parents had married at Leiden in 1611. Early in 1620 a child of the family is recorded as buried at St Peter’s church in Leiden, and later that year they sailed on the Mayflower. William Bradford’s list of the passengers names “Mr. Isaac Allerton and Mary his wife, with three children, Bartholomew, Remember and Mary”.

The winter after the landing was hard on the family. Her mother is recorded as giving birth to a stillborn son aboard the ship in Plymouth harbor on 22 December 1620, and she died at Plymouth on 25 February 1621. Her father later married Fear Brewster, a daughter of Elder William Brewster (1564–1644) and a sister of Love Brewster (about 1612–1650), both of them also ancestors of Frederic Roger Curtis. On 22 May 1627 Mary is listed fifth in the second lot of the Plymouth division of cattle, with her father, her stepmother Fear, her brother Bartholomew, her sister Remember and her young half-sister Sarah.

Marriage and later life

About 1636 she married Thomas Cushman (1607–1691), who had come to Plymouth on the Fortune in 1621 and was later the ruling elder of the Plymouth church for more than forty years. Bradford, counting the descendants of the passengers in 1651, noted that her father’s “daughter Mary is married here and hath four children”. A scholarly Mayflower compilation gives the couple eight children, born at Plymouth between 1637 and about 1660, among them Isaac, later minister at Plympton. On 20 October 1653 Thomas sold his share, as one of the purchasers at Sowamsett, to Capt. Thomas Willett and William Paddy for £77, and Mary gave her free and full consent to the sale.

Later notes in Bradford’s manuscript list her among the Mayflower passengers still living, one in 1690 and another that gives “this present year, 1698”. She outlived her husband by eight years. On 16 March 1691/2 she swore before the Plymouth County Court to the inventory of his estate, and she died at Plymouth on 28 November 1699, seventy-nine years after the landing. She was probably buried near her husband on Burial Hill, and a monument raised there in 1858 is inscribed to her, her husband and his father Robert Cushman.

Notes

A Mayflower compilation gives her age at death as 83; her gravestone says “about 90”. A family chart compiled in 1994 gives her birth as June 1616 at Leiden; the compilations used here give about 1617, and no baptism record has been cited.

Marriage date

No record of the marriage survives. The date rests on Anderson (by about 1636), Roser (c1636) and Wakefield (ca. 1636); her father calls Thomas Cushman his son-in-law in 1646 (Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, vol. 2, p. 133).

Two infants of 1620

Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins (vol. 1, pp. 35–40), a compiled account, lists a child buried at St Peter’s in Leiden in February 1620 (New Style) and a son stillborn aboard the Mayflower on 22 December 1620.

Death and burial

Roser’s entry for her cites the Plymouth town vital records (vol. 1, p. 203) for her death on 28 November 1699. The 1858 monument names her, “aged about XC years”. The proceedings at the monument’s consecration in 1859 say that “Near the Elder were buried his wife Mary”, which places her near her husband; the burial place is therefore given as probable.

Later notes in Bradford’s manuscript

The note of 1690 writes her surname “Chusman” (“Mary Chusman, the daughter of Mr. Allerton”); the later note gives “this present year, 1698”.

Land at Sowamsett, 1653

The deed is printed in The Mayflower Descendant, vol. 4 (1902), pp. 35–37. Sowamsett is the name the record gives the land, and the land is placed at Seekonk.