♀Mary (surname unknown)

Mary (about November 1661 – 12 November 1742) was a woman of Duxbury in Plymouth Colony^W and later of Kingston, the wife first of the carpenter Wrestling Brewster and then of John Partridge, and the mother of ten children by the two marriages. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Brewster (1678–1761).

Life

No record of her birth, her parents or her maiden name has been found. The Brewster family genealogy published in 1908 calls her only “Mary”, and a compiled Mayflower genealogy of 1995 lists her with no surname. Her birth in November 1661 is worked back from the age on her gravestone.

She married Wrestling Brewster of Duxbury, a carpenter and a grandson of Elder William Brewster^W of the Mayflower. No record of the marriage survives; the 1995 genealogy places it before 1678, and the 1908 genealogy gives the birth of their eldest child, Mary, as 10 February 1678/79, when her mother was seventeen. The couple lived at Duxbury and had eight children, five daughters and three sons.

Wrestling Brewster died at Duxbury on 1 January 1696/97, without a will. On 2 February 1696/97 the Plymouth County court appointed “Mary Brewster Relict and widdow of Wrestling Brewster late of Duxborough … Carpenter Deceased Intestate” to administer his estate. She gave a bond of £200, with Edward Southworth and John Sprague as her sureties, and signed with her mark.

On 23 May 1700 she married John Partridge of Duxbury, a son of George Partridge and Sarah Tracy, who had married Hannah Seabury at Duxbury in 1684. They had two sons, Benjamin and Isaac Partridge. John Partridge’s sister Lydia had married Wrestling Brewster’s brother William, so the widow’s second marriage joined a family already allied to her first husband’s. In 1707 her eight Brewster children settled their father’s estate by deed: the five daughters released his Duxbury lands to their three brothers, and the brothers released the household goods to their sisters.

John Partridge died on 5 April 1731, in his seventy-third year. Mary outlived both husbands. She died at Kingston on 12 November 1742, and her gravestone there gives her age as 80 years, 11 months and 27 days.

Notes

Some online family trees name her as Mary Howland, a daughter of John Howland Jr. and Mary Lee, born in 1662 and married in 1681. Robert Roser’s Mayflower Increasings (1995) shows that the Howland daughter Mary was a different woman, born about 1652, who married John Allyn and died after 1711, probably in Connecticut. The same work gives Mary’s maiden name as unknown and the marriage as before 1678. One published source gives her age as 80 years, 11 months and 29 days.