William and Mary

I realize in my rambling about how this could have played out, I have cast aspersions on eminent people like William Brattle for whom I should probably just apologize; I have absolutely no evidence that William Brattle was involved in this situation at all. He was John's best friend, and therefore our Mary would have to know him. We are looking for a William in her life or someone she might want to name her child after. But all this is just speculation anyway. It's possible that she had no child but just disappeared into thin air, or, went up to Wenham without any other reason, if that was even her. It's all just speculation.

I went and did some reading about the kinds of things that happened if one did have an out of wedlock child in Puritan Boston. If that's what happened, she would have been in quite a jam, but it would explain why she disappeared so thoroughly for about sixteen years, and really forever, since I only found the Mary Leverett of Wenham last year. When she surfaced, it was in Wenham, near Salem, in 1713, marrying into a prominent family where the man, who had been married to the sheriff's daughter (now there's your connection to the witch trials), had been left with three children, one very small, when his wife died. He was from a prominent family in the area and they even named Moulton Hill after the family. But Wenham was a tiny town, on the road from Salem to Ipswich, and everyone knew everyone. If she had been hiding up there, or raising an out-of-wedlock child, I think almost everyone would know it.

Besides, by the time she married him, William had almost come of age, or maybe already had. Only two years later, he'd marry a Mary Whittridge in Boston. She would most likely be from the Ipswich/Wenham/Salem area, as that's where all the Whittridges were from (in all their various spellings), but he didn't have to grow up in the area to meet her. It could be that both Mary and young William knew Boston much better, but in moving to Wenham Mary was able to break out of the life she'd had as a single mother and finally, thirteen or fourteen years later, come out of hiding and be part of a working larger family. When William met Mary, he very well could have said to her, we can go back to Boston, because I know people there. Once they were in Boston, it would be easier to explain their moving to Chelsea or Medford or wherever they ended up, if that's what happened.

As it is, you look at William Laverick marrying Marry Whittridge in 1715, and William Leverit having a baby Phebee in 1716, and wonder where they came from. There are no Lavericks or Leverits anywhere in Boston, no Whittridges, no Phebees in either family. Perhaps the web has yet to uncover some clues as to how they got there and even what happened to Phebee, who seems to have grown up there in Boston, or not, and simply disappeared. They could be a complete anomaly and family events can be explained by later occurrences, as the whole century was pretty murky really.