♀Mary Harndell

Mary Harndell (6 July 1647 – before 1680) was a Newport, Rhode Island, woman, the daughter of John Harndell of Newport and the first wife of John Stanton, whose children born between 1668 and 1677 are entered in the register of the Newport Friends. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Stanton (1668–1747).

Life

Mary was the daughter of John Harndell of Newport, whose name the records also spell Horndell, Harndel and Harndale; her mother’s name is not known. An elder daughter, also named Mary, was born in 1646 and is said to have died young. Mary herself was born at Newport on 6 July 1647.

In 1667 she married John Stanton, a Newport man born there in 1645, the son of Robert and Avis Stanton. The wedding is said to have been held in a Friends’ meeting. The Friends, the Quakers of Newport, recorded the births of their children Mary on 4 June 1668, Hannah in 1670, Patience in 1672, John in 1674, Content in 1675 and Robert on 4 May 1677; a son Benjamin is known from other records.

Mary died young, before 1680. A compilation of New England marriages dates John Stanton’s second marriage, to Mary (Clark), a woman twice widowed, after 12 March 1680. Her father made his will at Newport on 9 February 1685, naming his daughters Mary and Rebecca and Mary’s children Robert, Benjamin, Mary and Hannah; he died at Newport on 6 February 1687, and the Friends entered his death in their register.

Notes

Death

When Mary died is uncertain. The “before 1680” date rests on the marriage compilation’s dating of her husband’s second marriage. A dictionary’s summary of her father’s will of 1685 still calls her “wife of John Stanton”, which would have her alive that year; the will’s own wording is not known in full, and it may name her only to identify her children. Two compiled genealogies, A Book Called Our Ancestors the Stantons (1922) and Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, give the couple a son Benjamin born 13 March 1684, which conflicts with the date of before 1680 for her death; the question is unresolved.

Birth

The printed register of the Newport Friends gives her birth as 6 July 1647 (Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, vol. 7, p. 64). Savage’s dictionary also gives that day, in its entry for her father (“had Mary, b. 6 July 1647, wh. m. John Stanton”), without naming a source.

The elder sister

The same register page records a Mary, born at Newport in 1646 to John and his wife. Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, under Harndel (p. 93), lists “II. Mary, b. 1646, d. young”, which is the source for her death in childhood.

The marriage

The year 1667 is on record in Savage’s dictionary and in Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700. The Friends’ meeting detail comes from A Book Called Our Ancestors the Stantons (1922), pp. 30–31, which gives “married Mary Horndale, his first wife, in 1667, in Friends’ Meeting”; that detail rests on that book alone.