♀Mary Stanton

Mary Stanton (4 June 1668 – 11 May 1747) was a Newport-born Rhode Island woman, the daughter of a Quaker family whose birth is entered in the register of the Newport Friends, and the wife of the Portsmouth farmer John Coggeshall. Her stepmother, whom her father married after her mother’s early death, appears to have been the widow of John Cranston, governor of Rhode Island. She was the sixth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mercy Coggeshall (1704–1778).

Early life

Mary was born at Newport on 4 June 1668, the daughter of John Stanton and Mary Harndell, and her birth was recorded by the Friends, the Quakers of Newport, along with those of her younger brothers and sisters Hannah, Patience, John, Content and Robert, born between 1670 and 1677; a brother Benjamin is known from other records. Her father, born at Newport in 1645, was the son of Robert Stanton, one of the town’s early inhabitants, who died there in 1672 aged seventy-three. Her mother’s father, John Harndell of Newport, named Mary among his grandchildren in his will of 1685; he died in February 1687.

Her mother died young, before 1680. Her father then married Mary (Clark), a woman already twice widowed; a compilation of New England marriages makes her the widow of a John Cranston and dates the marriage after 12 March 1680, which is the day Governor John Cranston of Rhode Island died. John Stanton served as a deputy in 1690 and died at Newport in 1713.

Marriage and family

Mary married John Coggeshall, a grandson of the colony’s first president, and lived with him on his farm on the line between Newport and Portsmouth, land his father had left him. They had a large family, among them the daughter Mercy, born in December 1704, who married Thomas Fish and settled at Dartmouth in Massachusetts. John died in 1727 and was buried on the farm.

Mary outlived him by twenty years. Her will, made on 4 March 1740, named her brother Benjamin Stanton as an executor and remembered her sons John, Joshua and Joseph, her daughters Mary Weaver, Hannah Weaver and “Mercy Fish, wife of Thomas Fish of Dartmouth, Mass.”, and her son-in-law Peleg Wood. She died at Portsmouth on 11 May 1747 and was buried beside her husband; a family history of 1930 records both headstones still standing on the old farm. Her slate gravestone in the John Coggeshall lot at Portsmouth, with a fancy top and carved in the Stevens shop, names her as wife of John and gives her death on 11 May 1747 in her 79th year, an age that agrees with her birth on 4 June 1668.

Notes

Her father’s death year, 1713 at Newport, is on the family’s reburial stone as transcribed; one later family book gives 1725, and a dictionary’s 3 October belongs to a namesake of Stonington. The Friends’ register lists her brother Robert’s birth in 1677, where one dictionary gives 1667.