♀Mary Patten

Mary Patten was a woman of Arundel, a coastal town of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in what is now Maine, who married William Wilson (1741–1826) of Topsham in 1769. She was the fourth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son Johnson Wilson.

Origins

Nothing is on record of Mary’s birth. An early history of Topsham written by Moses Woodman, which the town’s printed vital records quote, calls her the daughter of Robert Patten of Kennebunk and the sister of Actor Patten of Topsham. Robert Patten’s will, made on 15 March 1775, names his daughter Mary. Two of her sons were named Robert and Actor.

Little’s genealogy of the State of Maine, published in 1909, has Robert Patten crossing from Ireland in 1727 with his wife and their young son, and settling at Arundel about ten years later. According to the Wheelers’ history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, published in 1878, Robert Patten and his wife came from Ireland in 1737, when Actor, their only son, was six weeks old, and settled at Arundel, the town renamed Kennebunkport in 1821. Actor, they add, moved to Topsham in December 1760, at the age of twenty-three.

Marriage and family

On 12 October 1769 the intention of marriage of William Wilson of Topsham and Mary Patten of Arundel, the New England form of the banns^W, was entered in the Topsham town records. They were married on 4 December 1769, the day on which, by the same record, the town’s certificate was issued. Woodman credits the couple with eleven children, among them Robert, Actor, Lettice, Mary, Rachel and Johnson, and the town’s printed record of Johnson’s marriage at Topsham in 1807 draws on his history to name Johnson the son of William and Mary (Patten) Wilson. William died at Topsham on 15 April 1826, aged eighty-five. When Mary died, and whether she outlived him, is not known.

Notes

• The Topsham record reads “William of T. and Mrs. Mary Patten of Arendall, int. Oct. 12, 1769. [cert. Dec. 4.]” It records the intention and the certificate, not the ceremony. The marriage date of 4 December 1769 also appears in an index of Maine marriages, which places the marriage at Lewiston, a town not incorporated until 1795; the place is the indexer’s, not the record’s.
• The record styles her “Mrs. Mary Patten”. In the eighteenth century the title could be given to a grown woman of standing whether or not she had married, and Woodman, who makes her Actor Patten’s sister, treats Patten as her maiden name. Woodman spells the brother’s name “Acter”.
• Her parentage rests on Woodman’s manuscript history, kept at the Maine Historical Society, and on Little’s summary of her father’s will. The Wheelers, who also call her “Mary Patten of Arundel”, most likely drew on the same work, so the two are not independent witnesses. A typed copy of Woodman’s account of the Wilson family gives the same parentage.
• A genealogy of the Merryman family published in 1905 also names William Wilson and Mary Patten as the parents of Actor Wilson.
• The town’s printed records list a gravestone, in the same burial ground as William’s, for Mary, widow of William, who died on 20 April 1833 aged eighty-one. More than one William Wilson of Topsham had died by then, and nothing yet ties the stone to her.
• Online family trees give her birth as 1745, in York County; no record of it has been found.

Her father, Robert Patten

Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine, vol. I (1909), pp. 214–15, summarizes Robert Patten’s will of 15 March 1775 and names his daughters Margaret, Mary and Rachel; it gives the will only in summary. Little also says that Robert’s first wife, whose maiden name was McGlenthlin, died on the voyage, and that he married Florence Johnson at Scarborough on 26 December 1743. No source names Mary’s mother, so which of his two wives was her mother is not known. Little gives 1727 for the crossing and the Wheelers give 1737. Neither is a date for Mary.