♀Mercy Deming

Mercy Deming (1651 – 16 December 1714) was a woman of colonial Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony, who was widowed when her husband Joseph Curtis died on the last day of 1683, and whose eldest daughter, Meribah, died about two weeks after her father, at about ten years old. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Thomas Curtis (1680–1752).

Early life

The family tree places her birth at Wethersfield in 1651 and makes her a daughter of John Deming (1615–1705), one of the town’s first settlers, and his wife Honor Treat (1616–1690). That parentage comes from later genealogies, not from a record of her own. The Wethersfield town book does not record her birth, and nowhere in it is she called a Deming.

Marriage and family

On 8 February 1673/74 Joseph Curtis of Wethersfield married “Mercy” before Captain Samuel Wells. The town clerk wrote no surname for the bride. The family tree gives the couple six children, born between 1674 and 1682, and the town book enters those it records as children of “Joseph & Mercy”, sometimes spelled “Marcy”.

Joseph Curtis died on 31 December 1683, aged 40, and Meribah died on 15 January 1683/84. The estate was valued at £271 9s., most of it in land: a house and home lot, upland, swamp and meadow. A John Deming was one of the two men who appraised it; the record does not say which of the town’s John Demings he was. The inventory lists five surviving children, from Joseph, aged nine, down to David, aged one. On 6 March 1683/84 the widow appeared in person before the commissioner, Samuel Talcott, and swore that she had declared the whole estate. The court gave her the administration, £20 of the personal estate and a third of the real estate for her lifetime. It named Sergeant John Deming, Ebenezer Deming and John Curtis as overseers to help her. The town book shows a “Sergt. John” with a wife Mary baptizing a son in 1648, which points to the younger John Deming (married 1657) rather than John Deming (about 1615 – 1705), whom the family tree makes her father. The presence of Demings on the estate fits the family account that she was a Deming, but it does not prove it. On 27 April 1699 the same three men divided the land among the five children, by then grown. She is not named in that division.

Second marriage

On 10 March 1685 the Wethersfield town book records that Joseph Wright married “Mercy”, again with no surname. Wright was a widower whose first wife, Mary, had died in August 1683. A standard reference work on New England marriages identifies this bride as Joseph Curtis’s widow, Mercy Deming. It gives no source for that identification, and no record found so far links the two women. John Deming’s will of 26 June 1690 leaves five pounds each to his daughters by their married names only: Morgan, Beckly, Hurlbut and Wright, with a smaller token to his daughter Moody. There is no daughter Curtis. That is what the will would say if his daughter Mercy had become a Wright in 1685. Another genealogy credits Joseph Wright and his wife Mercy with two sons, Benjamin and Nathaniel, the second born in 1688.

Joseph Wright’s will, dated 14 February 1711/12, left “my beloved wife Mercy” twenty pounds and the use of part of his dwelling house “during her widdowhood”. The family tree gives Mercy Deming’s death as 16 December 1714 at Wethersfield, and she was buried there. Index entries date Joseph Wright’s death to the next day, 17 December 1714. If she was his wife, she died a day before him and never became his widow.

Notes

The records spell her name inconsistently. The town book enters one son as born to “Joseph & Mary”, with “Mercy” given in another copy. In the original inventory the widow who took the oath is written “Mary Curtice”, while the printed abstract of the same estate has “Mercy Curtice”.

Her Deming parentage has not been confirmed. The Treat Family (1893) lists ten children of John Deming and Honor Treat and does not include her, although that book also names a daughter who has been shown to belong to another family. Another compilation says she married “Thomas (or Joseph) Wright” and died without children. That cannot be true of the Mercy who had children by Joseph Curtis. Neither the Wethersfield nor the Hartford town records hold a Mercy Deming born in this period.

Savage and later compilations add a son Henry, born in 1676. Neither the 1683 inventory nor the 1699 division names him, and no birth or death record has been found, so he is not counted among the children here.