♂Matthew Mayhew

Matthew Mayhew (died before 27 June 1614) was a yeoman of Tisbury in Wiltshire, England, and probably the father of Thomas Mayhew^W, the merchant who became proprietor and governor of Martha’s Vineyard. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Thomas Mayhew (died 1682).

Family at Tisbury

He married Alice Barter at Tisbury on 2 October 1587; the register writes the couple as “Mathew Maow and Ales Barter”. Seven children were baptized there between 1589 and 1602: Elizabeth, John, Thomas, Joane, Alice, Katherine and Edward. Thomas, the third, was baptized on 1 April 1593.

His sister Agnes Mayhew, also of Tisbury, remembered that boy when she made her will on 12 January 1606, leaving “to Thomas the son of my brother Matthew, five pounds”. Her will was proved on 24 June 1612.

Will and death

On 31 August 1612 Matthew made his own will as “Mathew Maihew of Tisbury, yeoman”. He left forty pounds to his son Thomas and further bequests to Edward, Joane, Alice and Katherine, and he made his son John sole executor. John and Edward Bracher of Tisbury, Richard Langly of Boreham and John Gilbert of Deny Sutton were to oversee it. The will was proved on 27 June 1614, by which time he had died.

His son Thomas

His son Thomas was most likely the Thomas Mayhew who had reached Massachusetts Bay as a merchant by 1632 and who in October 1641 obtained, with his own son, the right to settle Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and the Elizabeth Isles. That the boy baptized at Tisbury in 1593 was the future governor is an inference.

Notes

Sources

The marriage, the baptisms and both wills come from Charles Edward Banks, “English Ancestry of Gov. Thomas Mayhew”, in The Genealogical Advertiser 4 (1901), pages 1 to 8. Banks printed extracts of the Tisbury parish register, which he copied at the vicarage in 1898, the text of Matthew’s will and an extract of Agnes’s, both from the Archdeaconry of Sarum (Matthew’s at VIII.224, Agnes’s at VIII.168). The baptisms he gives are Elizabeth 1 May 1589, John 17 January 1591, Thomas 1 April 1593, Joane 8 February 1595/6, Alice 18 December 1598, Katherine 15 March 1600 and Edward 14 April 1602. The register spells the surname Maow; the will, Maihew.

Origins

The register as Banks extracted it begins in 1563 and has no baptism for Matthew, which suggests he was born before that year. It records the burial of Ales, wife of Thomas Maow, on 14 July 1586, and of Thomas Maow on 1 June 1590. Banks suggested that this Thomas was Matthew’s father, and, from the seal Governor Thomas Mayhew used, that the family was a younger branch of the Mayhews of Dinton, who bore arms. Both are his conjectures; no record names Matthew’s parents.

The governor’s baptism

Banks called the identification of the governor with Thomas, son of Matthew, inferential. It rests on the names Tisbury and Chilmark, which reappear on Martha’s Vineyard, on the name Matthew among the governor’s grandsons, and on the ages the governor gave for himself: on 15 September 1664 he wrote “I am 71 and 5 monthes”, which fits a baptism in April 1593. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins follows Banks in naming the governor’s parents as Matthew and Alice (Barter) Mayhew.