♀Sarah Collier

Sarah Collier (baptized 30 April 1616 – 26 April 1691) was an English-born colonist of Plymouth Colony, the daughter of one of its leading men and the wife of a son of the Mayflower elder William Brewster. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Wrestling Brewster (1644–1696).

She was baptized at Southwark, across the Thames from London, on 30 April 1616, the daughter of William Collier, a London merchant adventurer who had invested in the colony before he came to it: one of the London adventurers (investors) in the Plymouth settlement, and one of the few of them who later crossed to live there. Savage’s dictionary of the first settlers of New England says that he came in 1633 and that four of his daughters came over; he served as an Assistant of the colony for twenty-eight years between 1634 and 1665, and was one of its commissioners to the United Colonies in 1643.

On 15 May 1634 she married Love Brewster (1612–1650), the son of Elder William Brewster of the Mayflower. Her sisters also married into the colony’s leading families. The colony’s court records give Rebecca’s marriage to Job Cole at Plymouth on 15 May 1634, the same day and at the same place as Sarah’s, and Elizabeth’s marriage to Constant Southworth at Plymouth on 2 November 1637; Constant’s widowed mother had become the second wife of Governor William Bradford, according to Savage’s dictionary. Mary married Thomas Prence, later governor, on 1 April 1635, a date that Savage’s dictionary and a compiled Brewster genealogy both give. Sarah was widowed in 1650. According to a genealogy of the Brewster family published in 1908, she married secondly, after September 1656, Richard Parke of Cambridge, who died in 1665, and the Plymouth church entered her death as that of “mris Sarah Parke, widow”. She died at Plymouth on 26 April 1691 and was probably buried on Burial Hill on 6 May, though no record of the burial has been found.

Notes

The burial

No source for the burial has been found. The Mayflower Descendant, volume 3 (1901), page 192, records the death on 26 April 1691 and gives no burial, and the Find a Grave entry for her gives no burial date either. The date of 6 May and the place on Burial Hill are therefore kept as probable, not proved.