♀Rebecca Allen

Rebecca Allen (fl. 1675–1707) was a colonial New England woman of Charlestown, Massachusetts, the daughter of the sea captain John Allen, who married John Goodrich of Wethersfield, Connecticut, and who in 1707, with her husband, sold her late father’s house near the Charlestown ferry as one of his heirs. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Kirkham Goodrich (1682–1730).

Early life

Rebecca was a daughter of Captain John Allen of Charlestown, a mariner who had settled in the town by 1639, joined its church in 1641, and in 1666 was master of the ship Speedwell. A dictionary of New England settlers and a later family genealogy both call him the richest man in the town in 1657; by 1668 he was a captain and the town’s representative. The dictionary gives his first three children to his wife Sarah, “and perhaps others”. A history of Charlestown families names his three wives in turn, Sarah, Mary and Sarah, without saying which bore which child, and the family genealogy gives Rebecca to the second wife, Sarah. The dictionary and the Charlestown history both place Rebecca, with her sister Elizabeth, before her brother Samuel, who was born on 29 November 1656. Her other brothers and sisters included John, born in 1640, who studied at Harvard; Mary, born in 1643/44; and Thomas, born in 1667.

Her father made his will on 1 February 1672/73 and died on 27 March 1675. He left bequests to his wife Sarah and to Samuel, Thomas, Elizabeth and Rebecca, and his estate included 1,000 acres of land and an eighth share in the Charlestown mills. The county’s probate register names Sarah Allen as executrix. On 12 March 1675/76, within a year of his death, the Charlestown church admitted Rebecca as a member, entering her as “the dau. of Capt. Allin dec.”

Marriage and family

On 28 March 1678, at Charlestown, Rebecca Allen married John Goodrich (1653–1730) of Wethersfield; a genealogy of early Connecticut families published in 1856 records that Mr. Danforth performed the ceremony. The couple settled at Wethersfield, where they had nine children, born between 1679 and 1694. One son was named Allyn, after her family, and her daughter Abigail later gave the name Allen to a son of her own. Three of the daughters married at Wethersfield: Sarah to Abraham Kilbourn in 1699, Mary to Thomas Curtis in 1703, and Abigail to Thomas’s brother David Curtis in 1706. Two of the children died in their early twenties, Rebecca in 1703 and Samuel in 1706.

Rebecca kept an interest in her father’s estate for decades after her marriage. A published abstract of the Charlestown estates records that in 1707, as heirs of John Allen, “John Goodrich and w.” conveyed a house and about half an acre near the ferry, bounded by Major Sedgwick’s lane, to N. Blagrove of Bristol. Her sister Elizabeth’s second husband was a Blagrove.

Death

She was living in 1707. She is said to have died at Wethersfield and to be buried there, but no record of her death has been found, and its date is unknown.

Notes

Her year of birth has not been established. Many family trees give her a birth on 20 May 1664 at Sudbury, Massachusetts, but that entry, a Middlesex County record printed with the Sudbury vital records, belongs to another Rebecca Allen, entered as the daughter of a John and Sarah Allen; a different John Allen was living at Sudbury in those years, and that couple had a son Thomas there in April 1666, fifteen months before Captain Allen’s son Thomas was born at Charlestown to John and Mary Allen. The two Charlestown compilations place this Rebecca’s birth before November 1656, which would make her at least twenty-one at her marriage in 1678; a birth in 1664 would have made her a bride of thirteen. An 1889 Goodrich genealogy, followed by a standard compilation of early New England marriages, gives her birth as February 1660, which is also too late for the Charlestown order of the children.

The same 1889 genealogy names her mother as Ann. The Charlestown history names her father’s wives as Sarah, Mary and Sarah but does not say which bore which child, and the family genealogy that calls Rebecca a daughter of the second wife, Sarah, is the only one of these works to name her mother; the dictionary of settlers suggests that John Allen may have had an earlier wife named Ann, but that rests on an uncertain identification of him with a passenger of 1635.