♀Mary (surname unknown)

Mary (died before 12 July 1699) was the wife of Thomas Fish, one of the early settlers of Portsmouth in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations^W, and outlived him by about twelve years, leaving a will that shared out her pewter, brass and linen among her three daughters. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Thomas Fish (1649–1684).

Life

No record gives her family name, her parents, or the date and place of her marriage. Their eldest son, Thomas, was born at Portsmouth about 1649, and six more children followed: Mehitable, Mary, Alice, John, Daniel and Robert. Her son Thomas died young, before May 1684, leaving small children. Her husband died before 13 December 1687; his will made her executrix and left her the rest of his estate after land for their son John and small sums for Robert, the three daughters and their grandson Preserved.

Widowhood and will

As a widow she made a will, adding a codicil on 9 September 1697, and named her son Daniel executor. She left £5 each to her sons John and Robert, with a cow for Robert, and £5 each to her daughters, by then Mehitable Tripp, Mary Brayton and Alice Knowles, with household goods for each: a brass chafing dish^W, a pewter platter and three porringers^W for Mehitable, a table, basin and long cups for Mary, and two feather pillows and a pewter candlestick for Alice. The three daughters were to share all her clothing, linen and woollen. She named her grandchildren too, among them Preserved and Mehitable, “children of son Thomas, deceased”, and Daniel received “all the outward movables”. The will was proved on 12 July 1699; she was probably about 75.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her grandson Preserved Fish, who married Ruth Cook at Portsmouth. Their son Thomas Fish (1703–1786) was the father of Elizabeth Fish (1736–1814), whose daughter was Waite Allen (1766–1850). Their daughter Amy Fish married James Akin, and Amy’s daughter Ruth Akin (1731–1821) was the mother of Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828). Batchelder Sherman and Waite Allen married, and the two lines meet again in their daughter Salena Sherman (1806–1842).

Notes

Her family name

Lester Warren Fish, The Fish Family in England and America (1948), suggests with a question mark that she may have been Mary Soule. Some online family trees call her Mary Ayers. A deed of 20 March 1660, by which Henry and Ann Ayres gave Thomas Fish a house and land in return for fencing two acres while keeping its use for their own lives, may suggest a family tie, but no record calls her their daughter, and John Osborne Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887), which abstracts the deed, does not say so. Her surname is left blank here.

Sources

Her will and codicil are abstracted in the 1948 book (p. 35) and in Austin (p. 78); the bequests above follow those abstracts. Her age at death, about 75, is from the 1948 book alone. The children’s birth years are the 1948 book’s estimates.