♀Mary Cushman

Mary Cushman (12 October 1682 – 13 March 1722/23) was a woman of Plymouth and Plympton in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Plympton minister and, according to a compiled Mayflower genealogy, a granddaughter of Mary Allerton, the last surviving passenger of the Mayflower. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Waterman (1716–1750).

Early life

She was born at Plymouth in Plymouth Colony^W on 12 October 1682, the third of six children of Isaac Cushman (1648–1732), later minister of the church at Plympton, and his wife Rebekah. Her brother Isaac was born in 1676 and her sister Rebecca in 1678; Sarah followed in 1684, Ichabod in 1686 and Fear in 1689. The town record gives her mother only as Rebekah. Compiled Mayflower genealogies identify her, only as a possibility, with Rebecca Harlow (1655–1727), a daughter of William Harlow.

Isaac’s parents, by the same compiled genealogy, were Elder Thomas Cushman of the Plymouth church and Mary Allerton, who had crossed on the Mayflower as a child in 1620 and outlived every other passenger of that voyage, dying in 1699, when her granddaughter was sixteen. On that account Mary Cushman’s line is one of the two Mayflower descents in the family.

Marriage and family

On 19 March 1702, at Plymouth, she married Robert Waterman (1681–1750), a farmer born at Marshfield, and the couple settled at Plympton. The Plympton register enters eight children for them between 1703 and 1721: Isaac, Josiah, Thomas, Rebecca, Robert, Mary, Samuel and Anna. The sixth, Mary, born in 1716, married Jonathan Holmes of Kingston and is the child through whom the family descends.

Death

She died at Plympton on 13 March 1722/23, aged forty, and was buried that month in what is now Hillcrest Cemetery, Plympton, the burial ground where her father would be laid nine years later. The date of her death and the burial rest on compiled family accounts; no record of either is known.

Her father’s will, dated 25 October 1727, shows that she was dead by then. It names “ye Children of my Daughter Mary Waterman deceased” among the families of his children and appoints “my Son in Law Robert Waterman” as executor; it was sworn on 30 October 1732 and proved on 4 December 1732. A memorial compilation records that her husband had married twice more, in 1723 and 1727. The Plympton vital records agree that he had a second wife, Elizabeth Cushman, and a third, Abigail; the dates of those marriages rest on the memorial compilation alone.

Notes

The Plymouth town record, printed in The Mayflower Descendant, enters the six children together under the heading “The Children Isaac Cushman and Rebekah Cushman his Wife” and gives “Mary born on the 12th of October 1682”. The clerk wrote Isaac, born in 1676, second in the list and added that he “should have ben first set down”. The record spells the mother’s name Rebekah. A town index of Massachusetts vital records enters the 1702 marriage under the same date and place as above.

A christening in 1692, when she would have been about ten years old, is entered for her, but no record of it is known, and nothing explains the delay.

A marriage at Marshfield on 18 June 1727 is sometimes attached to Robert Waterman and Mary Cushman. A compiled marriage index names that bride as Abigail Dingley. She was Robert Waterman’s third wife, and the marriage does not belong to Mary Cushman, who had died four years earlier.