♀Mary Gilman

Mary Gilman (baptized 6 August 1615) was a colonist of Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and of Exeter, New Hampshire, and the wife of John Folsom. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, through her son Peter Folsom (1649–1718) and, most likely, her son John Folsom (died before 6 December 1715). In 1674 she sued Roger Rose for “diet and a cure that she did for his lad”, and won.

Early life and marriage

She was baptized at Hingham, in Norfolk, on 6 August 1615, and is said to have been the eldest child of Edward Gilman and Mary Clarke. John Folsom and Mary Gilman were married at Hingham, in Norfolk, on 4 October 1636, according to the family genealogies. In 1638 the couple are said to have crossed to New England with Mary’s parents, Edward Gilman and Mary Clarke, and her younger brothers and sisters, in the company that sailed with Robert Peck, the rector of Hingham, and in the autumn of that year they settled at Hingham, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Hingham and Exeter

Their children were baptized at Hingham: Samuel, Nathaniel, two sons named Israel, the elder of whom died in infancy, Peter in 1649, Mary, and Ephraim, the youngest, in February 1654/5^W. In the 1650s the family moved north to Exeter, and on 9 July 1659, by the town’s history, John sold their house near the Hingham training field to Daniel Cushing.

The county court’s records, as a Folsom family genealogy of 1938 prints them, tell how in April 1668 the marshal of Norfolk County and Henry Robie of Hampton complained that she had snatched an execution out of the marshal’s hands and torn it to pieces. An execution was the court’s warrant to collect a debt it had awarded. The court at Salisbury found her guilty and ordered her to pay treble damages to the party who had won the judgment, but held the execution back. That October Robie, as attorney for the town of Hampton, sued her husband and John Warren, her sureties, because she had not paid the town £18; the jury found for them, and her fine was put off.

Six years later she went to court on her own account. On 29 June 1674 she sued Roger Rose for debt, for the diet and the cure she had given his lad; Rose did not appear, and judgment was given for her on the evidence.

In 1676 John quarreled with Mary’s brother Moses Gilman over land at Exeter. At the Hampton court in May, Moses sued him for fencing in a parcel that Moses claimed, and lost; in June John complained that Moses had pulled up the fence between their lands. The “great endeavors of friends to persuade peace proved altogether fruitless”. Judgment went to John, Moses was to keep the fence up “until after the next Indian harvest”, and the two men were advised “to live in peace and love in the meantime as their relation and duty required”.

Widowhood and death

John Folsom died at Exeter on 27 December 1681 without a will. Mary outlived him, and she too died intestate before 7 January 1692/3, when the administration of both their estates was granted to their son Samuel. The inventory of the estate of John Folsom and Mary Folsom, his wife, taken on 17 January 1692/3, came to £11 12s.

Lines of descent

The two lines of descent from John Folsom and Mary Gilman to Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) run through their sons Peter Folsom (1649–1718) and, most likely, John Folsom (died before 6 December 1715). The lines meet again in Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), whose parents Elizabeth Gilman (1727–1806) and John Dudley (1725–1805) both descend from John Folsom and Mary Gilman.

The line through Peter runs on through his daughter Susanna Folsom, who married Caleb Gilman (1678–1766), a son of Mary’s brother Moses Gilman. Caleb’s daughter Elizabeth Gilman, most probably Susanna’s child, was thus a great-granddaughter of Mary and a granddaughter of Moses.

Notes

Her parentage

The Hingham register records her baptism in 1615. The Folsom genealogies of 1882 and 1938 call her the eldest child of Edward and Mary (Clark) Gilman. When her father’s estate was settled in 1655, her mother was ordered to bring in the consent of her children; Moses Gilman gave his, and John Folsom, Daniel Cushing and John Leavitt gave theirs on 29 September 1655, which places John Folsom among Edward Gilman’s sons-in-law. The administration of 1692/3 names John Folsom’s widow as Mary. According to the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire, she was over 54 in 1671.

Sources for her life

The cases of 1668 are in volume 4 of the Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County (pages 24, 61 and 65), quoted in Elizabeth Knowles Folsom’s Genealogy of the Folsom Family (1938); Constance Ames’s history of the Gilmans (1950) tells the same story from the Essex court files. The claim against Roger Rose is in volume 5, page 405, where she is called “Mary Folsham, sr.”, and the quarrel of 1676 in volume 6, pages 139 and 209. The administration and inventory are abstracted in the Probate Records of the Province of New Hampshire, volume 1, page 380; the inventory was signed by Moses Leavitt, and the 1938 genealogy lists its few items, among them kettles, a bed, pewter, two old chests, an old cloak and a Bible. Chapman’s genealogy of 1882 says that she survived her husband by eight or ten years, and the 1938 genealogy that she died at Exeter about 1692.

The marriage, the crossing of 1638 and the sale of 1659 rest on the Folsom genealogies, the History of the Town of Hingham (1893) and the Genealogical Dictionary. The Folsom genealogies take the children’s baptisms from the diary of Peter Hobart, the minister of Hingham.

The second line

The printed genealogies of the Folsom family, beginning with Jacob Chapman’s of 1882, make the Exeter deacon John Folsom a son of John Folsom and Mary Gilman. That parentage rests on those genealogies alone.