♂Thomas Cushman

Thomas Cushman (baptized 8 February 1607/08 – 10 December 1691) was an English-born colonist of Plymouth Colony who came over on the Fortune in 1621 as a boy of thirteen and served the Plymouth church as its ruling elder for more than forty years. He married Mary Allerton, the last surviving passenger of the Mayflower. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Isaac Cushman (1648–1732).

Early life

He was baptized on 8 February 1607/08 at St Andrew’s, Canterbury, in Kent, the son of Robert Cushman (1578–1625) and Sarah Reder. His father was one of the agents of the English congregation at Leiden who arranged the Pilgrims’ voyage of 1620. Father and son crossed together on the Fortune, the first ship to reach Plymouth after the Mayflower, which arrived on 10 November 1621. Robert Cushman sailed back to England with the ship within weeks and died there in 1625, leaving his son to grow up in the colony.

Marriage and family

About 1636, at Plymouth, he married Mary Allerton (1617–1699), a daughter of the Mayflower passenger Isaac Allerton, who had crossed in 1620 as a small child. She outlived every other passenger of that voyage, dying at Plymouth on 28 November 1699. A scholarly Mayflower compilation gives the couple eight children, born at Plymouth between 1637 and about 1660, among them Thomas, the eldest, who married Ruth Howland, a daughter of the Mayflower passenger John Howland, and Isaac, born in 1648/49, who became minister of the church at Plympton.

His will, dated 22 October 1690 and sworn to on 16 March 1691/92, names his wife Mary, his sons Thomas, Isaac, Elkanah and Eleazer, his daughters Sarah Hoaks and Lydia Harlow, and the three children of his daughter Mary Hutchinson, who had died before him.

Elder of the Plymouth church

The Plymouth church records that he was chosen and ordained elder on 6 April 1649, the office William Brewster had held until his death in 1644. A ruling elder was a lay officer who shared the government of the congregation with its minister and led it when it had none. He held the office for nearly forty-three years; the church record calls him “grave, sober, holy & temperate”.

He died at Plymouth after an illness of about eleven weeks. His gravestone and the town record give 10 December 1691, “in the 84th year of his age”; the church record gives 11 December. The church kept 16 December as a day of humiliation for his death, that is, a day of public fasting and prayer, and its record says that “much of Gods prescence went away from this chh. when this blessed Pillar was removed”. He was buried on Burial Hill at Plymouth. His original stone was moved in 1858 to make room for a monument about twenty-five feet high, inscribed to him, to his wife Mary and to his father Robert Cushman.

Notes

A family chart compiled in 1994 gives his death as 1681; the gravestone, the town record and the church record all give 1691.

The will, with the town and church records of his death, is printed in The Mayflower Descendant, volume 4 (1902), pages 37–40, from the Plymouth County probate records, volume 1 (1686–1702).

The marriage

The date comes from three compiled genealogies: Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins (volume 1, page 37) gives about 1636, Roser’s Mayflower Increasings (second edition) gives c.1636 at Plymouth, and Wakefield’s Allerton volume gives about 1636. No record of the wedding itself survives. The record that ties the two together is a Plymouth colony court entry of 1646, printed in Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, volume 2, page 133: Isaac Allerton calls Thomas Cushman his son-in-law, so the marriage had taken place by 1646. The 1646 entry is on record; the date and the place of the wedding are compiled.