♀Mary Michell

Mary Michell (baptized 4 December 1576 – buried 20 September 1648) was the wife of Rawkey Dolbiar, a yeoman of the hamlet of Cadhayne, in the parish of Colyton in Devon, England. In March 1634 their daughter Mary married Jonathan Gillett, a settler back from New England, and probably crossed the Atlantic with him that year. She was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through that daughter, Mary Dolbiar (died 1686).

Early life

She was baptized at Colyton on 4 December 1576, the third of the nine children of John Michell and, most likely, of his wife Emlyn Weeke, formerly of Gittisham. The family was then living at Cadhayne, the hamlet where her future husband’s family lived. Her father, one of the parish’s churchwardens in 1596, later settled in the hamlet of Barretshayes and lived there for the rest of his life.

Marriage

On 10 October 1602 she married at Colyton Rawkey Dolbiar, a son of Robert, a yeoman of Cadhayne. In 1605, when their daughter Anne was baptized, the couple were living at Minchinholme, a farm close to Cadhayne where her father seems to have lived in the 1570s; by 1611 they were back at Cadhayne. Seven children were baptized at Colyton, the last, John, in April 1619. Three were buried young: Joan in 1606 at the age of three, Dorothy in 1614 before her first birthday, and Cornelius in 1621 at five.

Widowhood

Rawkey was buried at Colyton on 12 November 1641. She lived on at Cadhayne as his widow and was buried at Colyton on 20 September 1648, entered in the register as “Mary Dollbier, widdow, of Cadden”.

Notes

Sources

The couple are known from the parish register of Colyton, which A. J. P. Skinner transcribed and the Devon & Cornwall Record Society printed in 1928. John Insley Coddington gathered the Dolbiar and Michell entries into families in his article on Jonathan Gillett and Mary Dolbiar in The American Genealogist (April 1939), and the dates here are the ones he printed. The pedigree rests on the register alone: Colyton lay in the peculiar jurisdiction of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, so the wills of its people are not in the printed calendar of Devon wills.

Her family

Her baptism is entered as “Marye, d. of John Mychell of Cadden”, and at her marriage the register names her as the daughter of John Michell of Barretshayes. Coddington joined the two through the baptisms of John Michell’s children, which call him in turn “of Cadden”, “of Mynchenholme” and finally “of Barretshayes”, and through his marriage at Colyton on 26 November 1569 to Emlyn Weeke; the baptisms name no mother. Because the family had so many men named John, Coddington confined his Michell pedigree to her immediate relatives, and warned that even this “must be regarded as tentative”. John Michell was buried at Colyton as “John Michell of Barretshaies” on 2 June 1620, and Emlyn on 30 August 1628.

The baptism of 1605 names the father of the child as “Rokie Dolber of Minchinholm”. Coddington made this the farm her own father had occupied, because a daughter of “John Mychell of Mynchenholme” was baptized in 1579.

Their daughter’s marriage

The register records the marriage of “Jonathan Gillett & Mary Dolbiar” on 29 March 1634. Coddington has the bride and groom sail for New England soon after the wedding, on the strength of a note in the Gillett family Bible, printed by Henry R. Stiles, in which one of Jonathan’s sons wrote that his father “came into new-inglan the secon[d] time in June in the yeare 1634”.