More of my rambling about Mary, William and Wenham. I'm just trying to work out how the following could happen: 1) A woman named Mary, full sister to John the Younger but twelve years (I think) younger, grows up in Roxbury at the family's sprawling estate, which is mostly countryside. They are poor since her dad is a lawyer but not a very successful one, and seems to have had a drinking problem. She and her brother Thomas grow up with her father, his second wife, and another stepsister by marriage, her stepmother's daughter. Thomas becomes a barber, which is not a very becoming trade for a young man who should be enjoying the fruits of his Puritan heritage as her brother John is. But they have no money (they have land, inherited from her grandfather, but that's not money until you sell it). Mary is eleven when her brother becomes a tutor at Harvard. He isn't making a fortune either, but he's happy, living the academic life with his best friend and classmate William Brattle.

Yes, we're looking for a William, but we're actually looking for two things: a father who could not, in any way, marry her and raise that baby. And second, someone to shelter her, so that she can bring up the baby without anyone in the Puritan community knowing.

Keep in mind that the Puritan community barely knows her in the first place, and the same goes for her half-brother Thomas. They've been out in the country, in virtual hiding, while dad drinks away the family fortune. I don't really have to find someone in Ipswich/Salem/Wenham to harbor her for fifteen years while she raises that baby; she can do it on the estate in Roxbury, and no one will ever know.

One reason William Brattle is a possible candidate is that he's extremely close to John, her brother (both twelve years older than her), and, in 1697, about to get married and have his own congregation in Cambridge. Everyone knows about the wedding and great things are expected. John is about to get married too, to a woman from Ipswich, which is why I thought with everyone from Ipswich in Boston all of a sudden, I should be looking for Williams among the Ipswich people, someone who could perhaps father the baby and shelter her for a few years. After all, in Boston, she is never seen again and nobody would even know she existed if it weren't for Hudson's 1692 will in which he names her as a daughter. In 1692, I believe, she was eighteen, but she could have been younger, and could actually have been his second wife's daughter. All we know is that in 1692 he had a daughter Mary and the second wife's father did not know about her, or consider her to be his granddaughter.

I infer that she was a stepdaughter in a house where the father already was making resources pretty scarce. When she went over to Harvard, there was her brother doing pretty well in an all-male world, and everyone was smart and going somewhere. Well, she fell in with the wrong guy at the wrong time and he couldn't marry her. Maybe it wasn't Brattle, but some other William who was hanging around, or even not a William, she just named the baby after a king or something. Whatever it was she had this baby and nobody could know about it. She was going to hide and bring that baby up.

William Leverett appears in 1715 and marries a woman named Mary Whittridge, who is almost certainly from the north shore Salem/Ipswich/Wenham/Gloucester area. He marries her in Boston though, how do you figure? I assumed he met her up there and that probably he lived up there at the time. And it's true, a Mary Leverett married Johnathan Moulton in Wenham in 1713, and died later in Wenham in the 1720's. There weren't many Mary Leveretts around; she was one of the few. I figure it had to be her.

But, she didn't have to have been in Wenham the whole time. She could have holed up with her baby in Roxbury, from its birth ~1697, until 1713, when the baby is now sixteen and she marries into a prominent Wenham family to a guy with three kids, recently widowed. Sure, she'll take care of those kids, if he'll allow for her sixteen-year-old, or however old he is, he's a boy, and a teen, and hard to feed. She moves him up to Wenham. Within a year or two he meets a local girl.

But they don't want to settle in Wenham, so what choice do they have? Go back to Boston. They've still got that sprawling estate where one can hide and be left alone. The world will never know.

Their first daughter Phebee disappears into the shadows; I still haven't accounted for what might have happened to her. Someone said she might have married into the Richardson clan, but searching there has been relatively fruitless. My questions for William and Mary Whittridge are these: did they have another William, ~1727? Did they have a Mary, perhaps in Chelsea, who I thought I saw one day in old birth records, but have lost the reference?

William (~1727) would grow up and marry a Chelsea girl, daughter of the deacon, pregnant with twins, in 1752 or thereabouts. That's really all we know about him but that places him in Chelsea along with the girl Mary who had that shadow entry, impossible to recover, in some Chelsea birth record. For some reason I put the whole family in the north side there as when William (~1727) dies out in Needham, the family actually brings him back to the north side, Medford maybe, to bury him. I think the family had some land in Medford/Chelsea, perhaps both places, and this might have been more desirable to them than Roxbury especially since the stepmother was still alive in 1715. This would be Mary's stepmother, but William's step-grandmother. Mary would not return to Boston; having married in Wenham, and taken on those three kids, she stayed up there, and died up there. When the step-grandmother died, she died alone; John didn't want to pay for her funeral; her son Thomas was already dead; his wife was struggling with the children, two out of the three of them would die. William and his new bride wanted no part of that, but life wasn't easy no matter who you were in 1715.

Thomas's son Knight would eventually come of age as a metalsmith, and raise two boys who would be in roughly the same generation as William (~1727). I haven't quite worked out the timing. At John's death in 1724 they divided up some property again and they had to sell one huge mansion to pay off John the Younger's debts. But Knight still had the house near the church. I think they had sold off the property in Roxbury too; times were tough. but Knight still was able to put his first son in the house near the church, downtown, in what is today Downtown Crossings; the second got the house out in Medford.

What happened to young William (~1727)? He kicked around the north side for a while with his new bride from Chelsea, and moved out to Needham just in time for the war. In the Revolution he was an officer, but officers didn't get paid very well, or at all. Life was a struggle. But he had eleven kids, many of them born in Boston (Chelsea, probably, or Cambridgeport), and they weren't recorded very carefully, but when he died the family moved him back and buried him in Medford. This shows me that that was perhaps his true home, or what they felt his true home should be.

Most of us, most reading this perhaps, are descended from William (~1727). We've been looking for his father, a much more elusive character. And who were his father's parents? I'm convinced that his mother was Mary, but I really have no idea about his father. Someone named William maybe? Someone who could no way marry her and bring him up? Did that even happen in Puritan Boston? It seems to me that if you had a place to hide, it might have been possible.