♀Mary Smythe

Mary Prudence Smyth (living in 1590) was the wife of William Brewster, receiver and bailiff of the Archbishop of York’s manor at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire and postmaster there under the Crown, and was left his widow in 1590. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son William Brewster^W (1566–1644), who became the ruling Elder of the Pilgrim church and sailed on the Mayflower in 1620.

Her husband died in the summer of 1590, leaving her a widow, and her son William was appointed administrator of his estate. By the account of the historian Henry M. Dexter, quoted in the 1908 Brewster genealogy, the Elder’s mother was named Prudence, and no other child of hers and her husband’s was then living. Family trees date the marriage to about 1552 at Scrooby; the date rests on those trees alone. Her family, her birth and her death are not known from any record; the Scrooby parish registers begin only in 1695.

Notes

The name under which she appears in the family tree joins two different women. Online family trees give William Brewster two wives: Prudence, said to have died in July 1590, and Mary Symkinson or Smythe, said to have been born in 1535 and to have died in 1567. This entry carries the second woman’s names with the first woman’s years, a birth in 1538 and a death on 10 July 1590 at Scrooby, and none of those rests on a record. No record in hand settles which of the two was the Elder’s mother; Dexter’s account, the only one that names her, calls her Prudence.

The death date of 10 July 1590 would also put her death a month before her husband’s, which the same online sources give as 10 August 1590, whereas the 1908 genealogy has him leaving her a widow.