♀Sarah Bonum

Sarah Bonum (10 December 1653 – 10 January 1741/2) was a woman of Plympton in Plymouth Colony^W, the wife of John Bryant (born 1650). She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Joanna Bryant (1690–1746).

Family

She was most likely the Sarah born at Plymouth on 10 December 1653 to George Bonum and his wife Sarah Morton, who had married there on 20 December 1644. In 1713 her brother George sold a lot at Monponsett that had been their father’s to “my Brother in Law John Briant of Plymton”.

When the Plympton town clerk entered the death of her daughter Joanna, the wife of Deacon Samuel Churchill, in April 1746, he wrote that Joanna had been born on 13 November 1690 and was “the daughter of Mr John Bryant and Mrs Sarah his wife, and was a sister of Capt. George Bryant, all of Plympton”. The printed Plympton vital records enter the birth of her son James on 26 July 1682 as “s. John and Sarah”, and a family genealogy published in 1870 names her only as John’s “wife Sarah” and lists six children, born between 1678 and 1693: John, James, Ruth, Sarah, Joanna and George. Plympton had a second John Bryant in the same years, Lieutenant John Bryant, who married Abigail, a daughter of Stephen Bryant, in 1665; the town book’s “Mrs Sarah” is what shows that this John, and not the lieutenant, was Joanna’s father.

Death and burial

She probably died at Plympton on 10 January 1741/2, in her eighty-ninth year, and was buried at Hillcrest Cemetery in Plympton. Her gravestone there records the death; no burial date is known.

Notes

Her surname and parentage

None of the records that name Sarah as John Bryant’s wife gives her surname. A 1713 deed makes it probable that she was a Bonum. In it George Bonum of Plympton, yeoman, sold a thirty-acre lot at Monponsett that had been granted to “my Honoured Father George Bonum Deceased”, and he described the earlier payment as made by “my Brother in Law John Briant of Plymton aforesd”. The deed also names “James Briant son to the sd John Briant”, which ties the John Bryant of the deed to the father of James, the husband of Sarah. A brother-in-law could also be the husband of a sister, but a compiled account printed in the Boston Transcript in 1924 gives George Bonum’s only son, George, as having married Elizabeth Jenney in 1681, which points to the connection running through John Bryant’s wife. No record of that marriage is known. Bertha W. Clark’s study of Sarah Bonum, published in The American Genealogist in 1959, makes the same identification and adds a second deed, of 5 March 1711/12, in the Suffolk County court files, in which John Bryant called George Bonum “my Brother-In-Law”.

The Plymouth register of births records “Sarah, the daughter of Gorg Bonum, born the 10th of December”, entered under 1653. Her birth on 10 December 1653 at Plymouth rests on that entry, as the likeliest match; no record calls her Bonum, and no marriage of John Bryant and a Sarah Bonum is printed in the register. Her death in January 1741/2 in her eighty-ninth year fits a birth in December 1653. The same register records two other Bonum daughters, Ruth, who married Robert Barrow in 1666, and Patience, who married Richard Willis in 1670. In September 1726 a George Bonum of Plympton, innholder, appears in a Plymouth County court record with James Bryant as one of his sureties, which fits the relationship without proving it.

The register names only her father. It records his marriage to Sarah Morton on 20 December 1644, and his wife Sarah consented to his deeds of 1647 and 1683, so she was most likely the mother of the Sarah born in 1653.

Death and burial

The date of death and the age come from her gravestone at Hillcrest Cemetery, as recorded on Find a Grave (memorial 35956286). Bertha W. Clark’s notes on Sarah Bonum are also cited for the death. The stone gives the death only, not the burial.