♀Mary (surname unknown)

Mary (buried 1 August 1627) was a widow of Frittenden, in Kent, England, who married the yeoman Richard Fowle of Frittenden and Headcorn in 1601 as Mary Filkes, and the mother of Joan Fowle, who married Richard Borden, one of the first planters of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. She was the tenth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through her daughter Joan Fowle (1604–1688).

Life

Mary was already a widow of Frittenden when she married Richard Fowle, who had a son, also named Richard, christened at Frittenden on 1 August 1601 by a first wife. On 3 September 1601 a licence was issued at Canterbury for Richard Fowle of Frittenden, yeoman, to marry Mary Filkes, a widow of the same parish, at St Margaret’s church in Canterbury; Thomas Harvie, a Canterbury shoemaker, stood bond. Mary had a daughter by her first marriage, also named Mary Filkes, who married Richard Stanyerd at Headcorn on 8 September 1623; Richard remembered her in his will as his “daughter-in-law”, in the old sense of stepdaughter, Mary Stannard.

Richard and Mary had three daughters: Joan, born about 1604, Elizabeth, christened at Headcorn on 12 March 1608/9, and Jane, christened there on 5 July 1612. Headcorn remained the family’s parish. Joan married Richard Borden at Headcorn on 28 September 1625, and Mary was buried there on 1 August 1627. She had lived to see her grandson Richard Borden christened at Headcorn on 9 July 1626. Her husband outlived her by four and a half years and was buried at Headcorn on 2 March 1631/32.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through Richard and Mary’s daughter Joan Fowle and her daughter Mary Borden, who married John Cook. They divide among the children of Mary Borden’s granddaughter Ruth Cook, and meet again in Salena Sherman (1806–1842), whose parents Waite Allen (1766–1850) and Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) both descended from Richard and Mary.

Notes

Her name

The licence calls her “Mary Filkes, s. p., w.”, that is, of the same parish as Richard, and a widow. Filkes was her first husband’s surname, so her own maiden name and her parents are not known, and the licence does not name her first husband. The only other Filkes licence in the Canterbury series, for John Filks of Faversham and Mary Best of St John’s in Thanet on 26 November 1579 (an index gives the marriage as 27 November 1579), is probably a different couple: a bride of 1579 would have been in her forties when Joan was born, and that family belonged to Faversham and Thanet.

Sources

The licence of 3 September 1601 is printed in Joseph Meadows Cowper’s Canterbury Marriage Licences, first series. Her burial, her daughters’ christenings and Richard’s will are from G. Andrews Moriarty’s account of the family, “Fowle-Borden”, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 75 (1921), pp. 226–233, built from the Frittenden and Headcorn parish registers and Kent wills. Her daughter Mary’s marriage at Headcorn in 1623 is from an index of the Kent parish registers. Moriarty prints no baptism for Joan; her birth year of 1604 comes from the Rhode Island genealogies of the Borden family.

Dates

Years written 1608/9 or 1631/32 are Old Style^W dates, when the year began on 25 March.