Mary of Ipswich

In preparation to write a biography of John the Younger, I am rewriting Eighteenth Century Leveretts, which has a few minor inaccuracies, and which needed rewriting anyway. As it turns out the process of rewriting is difficult and I find myself wanting to leave it basically as is, no matter how poorly organized, and change only what is necessary given more current information.

But I have run up again on one of the central problems of Leverett genealogy, and that is, what happened to the disappearing Mary, daughter of Hudson, around the time of the witch trials? Is she the same Mary who appeared in Ipswich marrying Johnathan Moulton, and then died in Wenham, Mass. in the early 1700's? Could she have brought a William up there, who then married an Ipswich woman, Mary Whiteridge?

This theory would require her to be in Boston at the time of the witch trials (Boston's was in 1688, Salem's in 1691-2), be with child probably, and make a conscious decision that raising that child would be easier in Ipswich, perhaps sheltered by a friend.

A number of Ipswich friends would be at her brother John's wedding, in 1696. He in fact was marrying an Ipswich woman and settling in Cambridge. He had a half-sister, Anne, who had married the son of an Ipswich historian, who was named William, by the way. We are looking for a William, by the way, because she named her child William and he would go on to have a son and grandson named William. A line of Williams starts right here.

But could he, or any of the Williams who might have attended that wedding, or whom she might have met, actually have brought her back to Ipswich to shelter her from Boston's cruel Puritan judgment? Would that even be a good move, at the time of the Salem witch trials? My theory, I have to admit, is skating on thin ice. I don't even know if single mothers were allowed to carry on in the Ipswich of 1696. I will carry on, though.