♀Wybra Hanson

Wybra Hanson was married at Leiden in Holland on 4 December 1610 to a man who was most likely William Pontus, later of Plymouth, and was probably the mother of his two daughters, Hannah and Mary, who married at Plymouth in Plymouth Colony^W in the 1640s. If so, she was the ninth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Hannah Pontus (1623–1690).

Leiden and Plymouth

At the marriage she is said to have been called a maid, that is, unmarried, and her bridegroom, written William Pautes, a fustian^W-worker “from near Dover”; William Brewster^W, the elder of the Pilgrim church, stood as his witness. Brewster was himself one of Roger’s ninth great-grandfathers, through another line. The marriage places the couple among the company of English exiles at Leiden from which the Pilgrims came. By 1633 William was at Plymouth, where his wife, known only as “Goodwife Pontus”, is said to have been living that year; whether she was Wybra is not known. The name came back at Plymouth a generation later: William’s daughter Mary, the wife of James Glass, called a daughter Wybra, born on 9 August 1649.

Notes

The marriage

The marriage is known from Charles B. Richardson’s notes from the Leiden records, published in the Historical Magazine, vol. 3 (1859), p. 263, as quoted in Gardner Asaph Churchill and Nathaniel Wiley Jones, The Churchill Family in America (1904), p. 2: William Brewster was witness for “William Pautes, fustian-worker, from near Dover on his marriage with Wybra Hanson, maid, on the 4 December, 1610.” Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700 lists the marriage under William Pontus. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins indexes her as Wybra (Hansen) Pontus, and the family history’s index also has “Hansen”.

Her children

That she was the mother of Hannah and Mary Pontus is the family history’s inference. That William Pontus of Plymouth was the William Pautes of Leiden is itself an identification, not a record, and his wife at Plymouth in 1633 is named only as “Goodwife Pontus” (citing the Mayflower Descendant, 1:160). The book’s evidence is the name: so uncommon a name as Wybra, given to Mary Glass’s daughter (Plymouth Colony Records, 8:7), points back to Wybra Hanson. Hannah was born about 1623, which fits a mother married in 1610. The link is likely but unproven.

What is not known

Nothing is known of her parents, her birth or her death. An anthology of Pilgrim sources gives her birth as about 1590 and suggests she was perhaps of Austerfield, without naming a record.