♀Mary Holmes

Mary Holmes (born 1 May 1745) was a woman of Kingston and Plympton in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, who moved with her husband to the hill town of Chesterfield and, in 1801, took a church letter with him to Norwich, Chenango County, New York. Through her father’s mother she was a third great-granddaughter of William Brewster, the Mayflower passenger and elder of the Plymouth church. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Morton (1768–1816).

Early life

Mary Holmes was born at Kingston on 1 May 1745, the daughter of Jonathan Holmes (1709–1787) and Mary Waterman (1716–1749/50). The Kingston town clerk entered her among the children of “Johnathan Holmes and Mary his wife”: an elder sister, Abigail, born in 1734, brothers Jonathan and Robert, a brother Charles who lived eight days in August 1741, and a younger brother, Jedediah, born in February 1748/49. Her mother died at Kingston in January 1749/50, when Mary was four. Her father’s mother, Mary Brewster, lived at Kingston until 1761, and it was through her that the family descended from Elder Brewster. By 1772 her father had married again; his will, made that year, names his wife as Rebeccah.

Marriage and family

On 9 October 1766, at Plympton, she married James Morton (1739–1810), a Plympton man. The printed Plympton records enter the marriage twice, once under each surname: “James and Mary Holmes” under Morton, “Mary and James Morton” under Holmes. The couple’s first two children, Josiah in May 1767 and Mary in October 1768, were born at Plympton, where the town clerk entered them under “The Children of James Morton by Mary his wife”. By October 1774, when a daughter, Mehitabel, was born, the family had moved west to Chesterfield, in Hampshire County, and Chesterfield’s records carry the remaining children. The couple had six children in all, born between 1767 and 1790. The youngest, born when Mary was nearly forty-five, was named Jonathan Holmes Morton, after her father.

Jonathan Holmes died at Kingston in 1787. His will, proved that year, left a legacy to “my Daughter Mary Morton”, the record that ties the married woman at Chesterfield to the Kingston family she was born into. Her mother’s surname came down the same line: in 1793 her daughter Mary, by then married to Jeremiah Curtis, named a son Waterman Curtis.

Norwich

A history of Chesterfield families records that James Morton and his wife “came to Chesterfield from Plimtown”, and that on 11 January 1801 they were given a church letter to Norwich. Their daughter Mary and her husband Jeremiah Curtis moved to North Norwich, in Chenango County, New York, between 1800 and 1804, so the two families resettled in the same place within a few years of each other. Mary was fifty-five when the letter was issued, and it is the last record of her found.

No record of her death has been found. A genealogy of the Waterman family, which gives her brothers Jonathan, Robert and Jedediah death dates and ages taken from their gravestones at Kingston, records for Mary only her birth and her marriage; she had left Plymouth County in the early 1770s.

Notes

The Kingston register’s two copies of the family entry differ: the earlier names the mother only as “Mary his wife”, and “Waterman” was written above her name later, in another hand. Her mother’s maiden name rests on that addition, on the Waterman genealogy and on the Plympton marriage record of her mother’s sister Rebeckah; the three agree.

An online profile for a “Mary Morton” born at Plymouth in 1746 and married to Silvanus Finney turns up in searches for her married name. That woman was born a Morton, the daughter of Josiah Morton and Melatiah Phinney, and is a different person.