♀Susanna (surname unknown)

Susanna is the name usually given to the wife of Ralph Allen, a settler of Sandwich in Plymouth Colony^W, and the mother of his children. Her forename rests on a family historian’s inference from Quaker meeting signatures of 1676 and 1682. She was the seventh great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Ebenezer Allen (1650–1725).

Marriage and children

Ralph Allen married, by about 1642, a woman whose forename many sources give as Susanna, though a compiled genealogy of the early immigrants notes that none of them cites a record naming her as his wife; her surname is not known. Nothing is known of her parents. Their eldest known child, Joseph, was born about 1642, according to the same genealogy. Their son Ebenezer was born at Sandwich on 10 February 1650. On 7 October 1651 the colony’s grand jury presented Ralph Allen, Senior, and his wife, with other people of Sandwich, for not frequenting the public worship of God. The record does not name her, but it places her at Sandwich in 1651, charged with the same neglect of public worship as her husband.

Ralph Allen’s will of December 1691 names six children: John, Joseph, Increase, Ebenezer, Zachariah and Patience. A seventh, Mary, was buried at Sandwich on 18 April 1675; the town’s entry, as the same genealogy prints it, reads “Meary Allen, the daughter of Ralph Allen Senior”. As the 1924 family history of Ralph Allen reports the Friends’ meeting records at Sandwich, a Susannah Allen signed beside Ralph as a witness to a Quaker wedding on 25 September 1676, and signed the meeting’s declaration of 1 September 1682 withdrawing fellowship from a member. That history infers, because no other Allen signed those lists, that she was Ralph’s wife; the forename Susanna rests on that inference. The will does not mention a wife, which suggests she had died before it was made.

Notes

The compiled genealogy is Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration, which gives her as “Susanna[?]”. A compiled index of early New England marriages likewise gives the wife of the Ralph Allen of Sandwich who died in 1698 as Susannah, with a query, and places the marriage before about 1640. Older compilations gave Ralph Allen’s wife as Esther Swift, but she was the wife of the other Ralph Allen of Sandwich, the mason who died about 1659, according to a compiled genealogy of the early immigrants. No record shows that the wife presented in 1651 and the Susannah of 1676 and 1682 are the same woman.