♀(surname unknown)

The first wife of Thomas Borden (died 1581), whose name is not known, was the mother of his four children and the grandmother of Richard Borden (1595–1671), who left Headcorn, in Kent, England, for New England and settled at Portsmouth, Rhode Island. She was the eleventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, both through her son Matthew Borden (1563–1620).

She and Thomas Borden (1533–1592), a yeoman of Headcorn, had four children in the 1560s: Thomas, Matthew, Joan and Agnes. Matthew was christened in the nearby parish of Frittenden about 1563. She was buried at Headcorn on 20 May 1581.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through her son Matthew Borden (1563–1620), Matthew’s son Richard Borden (1595–1671) and Richard’s daughter Mary Borden. They divide in later generations and meet again in Salena Sherman (1806–1842), whose parents Waite Allen (1766–1850) and Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) both descend from her.

Notes

Her name

G. Andrews Moriarty’s pedigree “The Bordens of Headcorn, Co. Kent”, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 84 (1930): 227, gives her burial at Headcorn on 20 May 1581 as the first wife of Thomas Borden, but not her name. A profile in the FamilySearch Family Tree calls her “Margaret Reader Borden”, born in 1541, with the same date of death. That joins her to Thomas’s second wife, Margaret, the widow of a man named Reader, whom he is said to have married in 1584, and is not evidence for her own name.