♀Mary Clarke

Mary Clarke (died 22 June 1681) married Edward Gilman (1587–1655), a yeoman of Hingham, in Norfolk, England, in 1614. She crossed with him to the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W in 1638 and was left a widow at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1655. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by five separate lines of descent, through her son Moses Gilman (died 1702), the nearest, and through her daughters Mary Gilman and Sarah Gilman (died 1700) and her son John Gilman (1624–1708), where she is a ninth great-grandmother.

Marriage and children

On 3 June 1614 Edward Gilman married Mary Clarke at Hingham, in Norfolk, England. She is said to have been a sister of the wife of Joseph Peck the elder, another Hingham family that later went to New England.

Eleven children are known, most of them baptized at Hingham between 1615 and 1634, and five were buried there young: the twin sons Moses and Joshua within days of their baptism in September 1619, Daniel in April 1634, Elizabeth in February 1634/5 and Jeremy, aged six, in August 1635. The six who lived to grow up were Mary, Edward, Sarah, Lydia, John and Moses.

New England

In 1638 the family sailed with the large company of Hingham people who followed their parson, the Puritan Robert Peck, to New England, one of the companies of the Puritan migration to New England^W, and by the usual account they landed at Boston from the Diligent of Ipswich on 10 August, Edward and Mary with their sons Edward, John and Moses, their daughters Sarah and Lydia, and three servants. Their married daughter Mary and her husband John Folsom came in the same company. The family settled at Hingham, Massachusetts, a town begun a few years earlier by neighbors from their Norfolk parish.

By 1650, it is said, Edward had sold his share of a land grant at Rehoboth to her nephew Joseph Peck the younger. She probably went with her husband when he moved to Ipswich about 1649 and on to Exeter, where he and their son Moses were accepted as inhabitants in 1652. In 1653 their eldest son Edward sailed for England to raise money and buy machinery for the family’s mills, and was, by the family accounts, lost at sea on the voyage.

Widowhood

On 14 January 1654/5 Edward reportedly made over his whole estate to Mary, to take effect at his death, apart from £30 each for their sons John and Moses. He died at Exeter before 10 April 1655, when administration of his estate was granted to Mary on condition that she produce “the consent of her children”; their son Moses and their sons-in-law John Folsom, Daniel Cushing and John Leavitt gave it on 29 September 1655. At the court held at Hampton on 2 October 1655 Mary swore to the inventory of his estate, which listed money in the hands of “my son John Levits” at Hingham, of Daniel Cushing and of Moses.

She signed a quitclaim on 7 March 1663. She is said to have gone back to Hingham, Massachusetts, the family’s first home in New England, where her daughters Sarah Leavitt and Lydia Cushing lived with their husbands, and to have died there on 22 June 1681, twenty-six years after Edward.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard descends from Edward Gilman and Mary Clarke by five separate lines of descent, through four of their children: Moses, Mary (by two lines), John and Sarah. All five come down her father’s side, through Kenneth Blanchard, and the nearest is ten generations up. The lines come together again in Elizabeth Gilman (1727–1806), in her son Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844) and in Nathaniel’s daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Her family

Her parents are not known. Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Abel Lunt (1963), makes her a sister of the wife of Joseph Peck the elder and so an aunt of Joseph Peck the younger, citing The Mayflower Descendant 25:65 and 26:103. Clarence Almon Torrey suggested that she and that sister were “possibly” daughters of a John Clarke buried at Hingham on 6 June 1615. The Hingham register begins only in 1601, too late to hold her baptism if she was of an age to marry in 1614.

Her life in New England

The Diligent, the landing on 10 August 1638 and the household come from the Hingham settler list of Daniel Cushing, as printed by Charles E. Banks and followed by Davis and the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire; the Folsom family histories (1876 and 1938) name the three sons and two daughters. The moves to Ipswich and Exeter, the deed of the estate, the quitclaim of 1663 and her return to Hingham follow Davis. The administration and the consent of her children are in the printed Probate Records of the Province of New Hampshire (vol. 1, p. 29); the inventory she swore to survives in the Essex County probate files.

Her death

The Genealogical Dictionary and Davis both give her death at Hingham, Massachusetts, on 22 June 1681.