♂Robert Tilley

Robert Tilley (buried 21 February 1612/13) was a yeoman of Henlow in Bedfordshire, England, where eight of his children were baptized between 1571 and 1590. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Tilley (died 1621).

Henlow

He was probably the son of William Tilly, a husbandman buried at Henlow in January 1578/79^W, and his wife Agnes, who was buried there in 1582 as “an old woman”. Robert and Elizabeth Tilley brought their children to the parish church at Henlow for baptism over almost twenty years: John in December 1571, then Rose, George, Agnes, Elizabeth, William and Edward, and last Alice in February 1589/90. When William was baptized in September 1585, the register named his father as a yeoman, a farmer of some standing, ranked below the gentry. Alice died young, and was buried on 29 July 1597 as “a younge mayde”.

Death and the Mayflower sons

Robert was buried at Henlow on 21 February 1612/13, and Elizabeth, by then his widow, was buried there in 1613. The baptisms of John and Edward are accepted as those of John Tilley^W and Edward Tilley^W, two brothers who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 and died in the first winter at Plymouth. Their wives died that winter too. John’s daughter Elizabeth, then thirteen, survived and married John Howland, and Roger’s line runs through her.

Notes

The family’s origin

The Henlow origin of the two Mayflower brothers was worked out by Robert Leigh Ward in a study published in The American Genealogist in 1976. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins follows it, giving both John and Edward as sons of Robert and Elizabeth Tilley. Edward’s baptism on 27 May 1588 is entered under the name Edmund.

His parents

William Tilly and Agnes are given as Robert’s parents by WikiTree, which cites pages 202–203 of Ward’s study. The two burials at Henlow fit that placing, but the parish register does not say whose parents they were.

The marriage

No marriage of Robert and Elizabeth appears in the printed Henlow marriages, which have no Tilley entry before 1588; where they married is not known.