♀Sarah Morton

Sarah Morton (died after 1683) was a woman of Plymouth in Plymouth Colony^W, who married the planter George Bonum there on 20 December 1644. Three of her daughters in a row were named Sarah: the first, born in December 1649, died that same winter, and the name was given twice more, the last time to a girl born on 10 December 1653. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Sarah Bonum (1653–1742).

Life in Plymouth

She was probably the Sarah Morton who in 1627 was one of the people joined to Francis Eaton’s lot when the colony divided its cattle. On 1 February 1640/41 the colony court ordered three men to lay out “Sarah Mortons lott” at the Eel River and to enter its bounds in the book of records, so that there would be no more dispute about them.

In 1647, when George sold John Faunce the lot next to Faunce’s own at the Eel River, Sarah gave her consent, and husband and wife both put their marks to the deed.

Family

Besides the three Sarahs, she and George had a daughter Patience, who married Richard Willis in 1670; most likely a daughter Ruth, who married Robert Barrow in 1666; and a son, George, born about 1657. The youngest Sarah most likely became the wife of John Bryant of Plympton. Richard Willis had died by 15 February 1683, when George gave his six-acre share of meadow in the lower south meadows of Plymouth to their granddaughter Ruhamah Willis; Sarah again gave her consent. She was still living then, and accounts of the family differ on when she died, giving 1691 or 1694.

Notes

Her parents

The colony records do not name her parents, and the marriage entry gives only her name. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins (volume II, pages 1296–1297), a compiled account, lists her among the children of George Morton and Juliana Carpenter and gives her birth as about 1620. Savage’s dictionary and Mary Lovering Holman’s Scott Genealogy (1919) also make her a daughter of George Morton of Plymouth and his wife Juliana Carpenter, but give her birth as about 1618, and Torrey’s index of New England marriages before 1700 gives her years as 1618–1691. Torrey also marks her, with a query, as George Bonum’s second wife.

The Sarah Morton of 1627 and 1641

The division of cattle in 1627 and the court order of 1641 name a Sarah Morton without a parent or a husband; that she was the woman who married George Bonum in 1644 rests on the name and the place. Anderson’s account places George and Juliana Morton’s daughter Sarah in Francis Eaton’s party in that 1627 division. George’s sale of 1647 was also of land at the Eel River; the records do not say whether it was the lot laid out for her.

Her children and her death

The Plymouth register records the marriage of “Georg Bonum and Sarah Morton” on 20 December 1644. It enters the births of the three Sarahs under their father’s name alone (“Sarah, daughter of George” in December 1649, and “Sarah, the daughter of Gorg Bonum, born the 10th of December” in 1653); the marriage, and her consent to his deeds of 1647 and 1683, make her their mother. The second Sarah was born on 12 January 1650 by the register’s year, which falls in what is now counted as 1651. The births of Ruth and Patience are not in the register; the Scott Genealogy places them about 1645 and 1647. The death in 1694 is Leach’s; Torrey gives 1691.