♀Rebecca Harlow

Rebecca Harlow (12 June 1655 – 3 September 1727) was a woman of Plymouth and Plympton in Plymouth Colony^W, the wife of Isaac Cushman (1648–1732), later minister at Plympton. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Mary Cushman (1682–1722).

She married Isaac Cushman at Plymouth about 1675. A compiled genealogy lists six children born to the couple at Plymouth between 1676 and 1689, among them Mary, born on 12 October 1682. She died at Plympton on 3 September 1727, in her seventy-third year, as her gravestone and the Plympton vital records give it; a compiled family history gives the day as 27 September instead. A Find a Grave memorial places her burial that month at Hillcrest Cemetery in Plympton. Her husband outlived her by five years.

Who she was before her marriage is less certain than her dates. The Plymouth Colony records register “Rebecka, the daughter of Wiliam Harlow”, born at Plymouth on 12 June 1655, and two compiled Mayflower genealogies identify her with Isaac Cushman’s wife, but both mark the match as only possible; one of them, citing the same page, gives the birth as 12 January. Her age at death agrees with that birth. On the compilers’ reading she was a daughter of William Harlow and his first wife Rebecca Bartlett, and through her mother a descendant of the Mayflower passenger Richard Warren^W; her brother William Harlow married Isaac’s sister Lydia Cushman. The name was common in the family: on the same reading her mother was a Rebecca, and two nieces named Rebecca Harlow were born at Plymouth in 1678 and baptized there in 1703. A journal article discusses the problem, but no known record shows that the Rebecka of 1655 was the woman who married Isaac Cushman.