♀Mary Rogers

Mary Rogers (born 1644) was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Reliance Phinney (born 1681). In 1664, at Barnstable in Plymouth Colony^W, she married John Phinney (born 1638), a colonist of the town.

Marriage and family

A compiled genealogy published in 1978 gives her birth as 22 September 1644, probably at Duxbury, Plymouth Colony. On 10 August 1664, at Barnstable, John Phinney married Mary Rogers, and the town clerk entered the marriage as that of “John Phinny Jur. and Mary Rogers”. The clerk listed their children under it, beginning with a son, John, born on 5 May 1665; the same genealogy counts twelve, born at Barnstable between 1665 and 1687, two of whom died in early childhood. Their daughter Reliance, born on 27 August 1681, married John Morton at Barnstable on 27 December 1705. A genealogical history of Maine published in 1909 records that their son John, a deacon, was the father of Captain John Phinney, the first settler of Gorham, in Maine.

Her husband’s will

John Phinney’s will was recorded in the probate records of Barnstable County, by then part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which had absorbed Plymouth Colony under its charter of 1691. It shows that his wife was still living. After his wife’s death their daughter Mary Eastland was to have “my best feather bed and bolster and one pillow”, and the rest of his movable estate was to be shared equally among his three daughters, Mary Eastland, Mercy Crocker and Reliance Morton. The remainder of the money that their son Ebenezer owed him was to go, after his wife’s death, in equal shares to his seven sons, John, Joseph, Thomas, Ebenezer, Samuel, Benjamin and Jonathan, and he named their son John sole executor. The 1978 genealogy, in its abstract of the will, calls him a weaver of Barnstable and dates the will 19 April 1718; it records that his inventory was taken on 9 March 1718/9 and that the will was proved on 19 June 1719. It takes that wife to be Mary and places her death at Barnstable after the will was made; the date of her death is not known.

Notes

Parentage

The 1978 genealogy, which traces the descendants of the Mayflower passenger Thomas Rogers, identifies her as the Mary born on 22 September 1644 to his son Lieutenant Joseph Rogers of Eastham. The printed records of Plymouth Colony do list a Mary, born on that day, among Joseph Rogers’s children. Joseph Rogers’s will does not mention a daughter Mary by name, but it leaves the rest of his estate “equally devided between all my Children”, so its silence does not count against her. No record names John Phinney’s wife as his daughter; the identification rests on the compilers’ matching of that birth with the Barnstable marriage of 1664.