♀Mary Wadleigh

Mary Wadleigh was born at Bristol, in England, and spent her married life at Saco and Wells, on the coast of Maine, as the wife of Thomas Mills. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Susanna Mills. Her birthplace is known from her daughter Martha’s baptism: carried off from Berwick in the raid on Salmon Falls^W in March 1690, on 29 June 1693 Martha was baptised as an adult in the Catholic church of Notre-Dame in Montreal, and the act names her mother as “native of Brestol near London”.

Saco and Wells

She was a daughter of John Wadleigh of Wells and his wife Mary. In 1651, by one account, she was among an “eloping party” that left Winter Harbor, the harbour at Saco, and was arrested at Barnstable, in Plymouth Colony^W, and sent home. The reason for the flight is not recorded.

She married Thomas Mills, a native of Exeter, in Devon, who is said to have been a fisherman. Their daughter Martha was born at Saco in 1653. The family then moved down the coast to Wells, where Thomas was granted land in 1659 and served as constable in 1664.

On 18 July 1664 her father gave her a deed of gift of land and marsh at Wells, which is said to have taken in the house the family was living in. Her mother was still alive that year but had died by 1671. When John Wadleigh made his will on 7 July 1671 he asked to be buried beside his late wife, and he left Mary a pair of oxen, household goods and a share of his cattle.

Family

Thomas and Mary had five children who are known: John, Mary, Sarah, Susanna and Martha. Mary and Sarah married the brothers John and Nathaniel Cloyes of Wells. Susanna married Isaac Cousins of Wells and later Lieutenant Peter Folsom of Exeter, and Martha married James Smith of Berwick.

Thomas had died by 27 June 1689. The date of Mary’s own death is not known. Her land at Wells passed to her children, and in 1722 Susanna, by then a widow at Exeter, sold a quarter part of the land and marsh that John Wadleigh had given his daughter in 1664.

Notes

Her birthplace

The act of Martha’s baptism, as Emma Lewis Coleman translates it in New England Captives Carried to Canada (1925), names her parents as “Thomas Mills, native of Excester in Old [England] and of Marie Wadele native of Brestol near London”. Bristol lies about a hundred miles west of London; “near London” is the act’s own wording. The Quebec parish registers index the same baptism, at Notre-Dame, Montreal, on 29 June 1693, with father Thomas Mills and mother “Marie Wadelo”. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire gives her birthplace from the same Catholic record.

Her parents

A York County deed of 1722 (Book XI, folio 5), by which her daughter Susanna sold part of the land “that John Wadleigh of Wells aforesaid gave unto his Daughter Mary Mills her heirs &c by a Deed of Gift bearing date the 18th of July 1664”, proves both that John Wadleigh was her father and that Susanna was her daughter. The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire adds that her mother Mary was absent from meeting in 1654 and living on 18 April 1664, and that John Wadleigh’s will of 7 July 1671 named three children, Robert, Mary (the wife of Thomas Mills) and Joanna. The gift of the house, the terms of the will and the death of her mother before 1671 come from the same dictionary.

The flight of 1651

The 1651 episode rests on the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire, whose entry for Thomas Mills says that in 1651 she was arrested at Barnstable and sent home. Its entries for Thomas Warner and Thomas Wallen name others in the same “eloping party from Winter Harbor”, among them Warner’s wife Katherine, who “went with an eloping party from Winter Harbor to Barnstable”. The dictionary does not say whether Mary was married by then.

Thomas Mills’s death

Thomas Mills was alive on 12 July 1681, according to the same dictionary, and the deed of 27 June 1689 (York Deeds Book VI, folio 148) by which Peter Folsom “with Susannah my wife” sold shares of John Wadleigh’s farm describes it as “adjoining to the land of Tho’ Mills Dec’d”.