what happened to Mary

So John the Younger, President of Harvard, had this sister Mary who disappeared; I can't honestly say that I know the the Mary I found is her. But I can tell you that it's likely that it's her; Mary Leveretts didn't just appear out of nowhere or come up from the South or from England in those days. New England was small in terms of numbers and it was the same families expanded and reappearing in various places as the Great Migration had long ago dried up and the waves of immigration had not really started yet.

So let's take what we know about this Mary and examine some of my various theories, a little after the dust has settled on my book Harvardinates where I put what I knew about John in there, and put the family drama of finding this Mary in the notes.

She was born about 1674, as John's younger sister; John had been born in 1662. John had a younger brother Bezaliel and perhaps another sister who died; Bezaliel would also disappear or die before adulthood. But in 1679 great changes happened. First, their grandfather Governor John died, and because he was governor at the time, and was enormously popular, there was a huge parade, and then his estate was divided; he gave two shares to his only son Hudson (John and Mary's father) and one to each of his six living daughters. But the other thing that happened was that John and Mary's mother, Sarah Payton, died, and though the exact date of that is unclear it's clear that the changes began happening around the same time.

For John, who was already on the road to a career at Harvard, it was of less consequence, because he was already 17 and on his way. But Mary was only five when this happened, and she would end up in Roxbury with her father where he seemed to abandon the downtown life to live with his second wife, Elizabeth Gannett Tay. Elizabeth had a daughter Elizabeth, so Mary would have a step-sister, but she now lived in obscurity and lots of people were unaware for many years that Hudson had even remarried. The marriage was recorded in the city of Boston, though.

In 1715 a William Leverett would appear in Boston marrying a Mary Whiteridge, and many have speculated that he was the secret to our family genealogy, which mostly springs from another William Leverett, who married in the 1740's in Chelsea and had eleven children. This William (~1691) may have been born of Hudson's second marriage, as Erwin Otis and others have suggested, born before he wrote his will and died right around then. But I maintain that he was born of Mary, who would have been the right age around then. A Mary Leverett reappeared in Wenham marrying a prominent landowner, Johnathan Moulton, in 1713, and later died up there, and this is my point: how many Mary Leveretts were there in New England at the time? This had to be ours; this had to be John's sister. But here's another coincidence: Of all the Whiteridges in New England (and this was spelled any of about a dozen ways), all of them were up there in Wenham/Salem/Ipswich, none were in Boston. So when William (~1691) married Mary Whiteridge it appears to me he may have met her up there and then brought her to Boston, to family land, to marry and have children. His path would somehow have led to Chelsea; he didn't stay there in Boston. They had a daughter Phoebe the following year (1716) and then the trail goes cold.

OK so looking back I have some work to do to prove that Mary, John's sister, had a child William, moved to Wenham/Ipswich/Salem, hid up there for fifteen years or so (or perhaps hid in Roxbury before moving up there), and then was the same person that married Johnathan Moulton later. Why would someone move to Salem at the time of the witch trials (1692) or soon afterward? At first I looked hard at John's wedding (1698), which was full of Ipswich people and which would have made William closer to sixteen when he was married. I figure that William could have been born anytime from about 1690 to 1699, and we might be looking for Williams as the name itself seemed to survive and be perpetuated for at least three or four generations beyond William (~1691). What William could she have named her son after? There are several theories.

One that I originally rejected was William Phips, Governor of the Colony. As Governor he had set up the court for the witch trials and then had abolished it when the trials got out of hand, so he was all over the news in 1692, right smack between the Mathers, and in the middle of public wrangling over what was happening. The reasons I rejected him were 1) he was already married; he and his wife had adopted a son Spencer, his wife's sister's child); 2) he died in 1695, in England. Reasons for him: 1) he was from Maine, and lived up on the north shore somewhere, with conveniently enough land and property where she could easily hide for years if necessary; and, 2) years later John the Younger gave two shares of his Muscongus Patent (also known as the Lincolnshire Patent or the Waldo Patent) to Spencer Phips, who had by then bought some land in Cambridgeport and was a neighbor, also with dreams of returning to Maine (John got two, Spencer got two, and each of the six sisters, or at least what was left of their marriages and families, got one). Could she have had this child of William before he died? While he was still married? This William by the way was a very strong character; he'd been born poor, was involved in successful treasure recovery in Caribbean waters, and was well-traveled enough to be a successful politician at the same time as managing property and life in Maine and the Salem/Ipswich/Wenham area.

To prove this one I would have to prove that the wife and the Puritan culture in general would accept an unwed mother coming to live and hide in the Salem/Ipswich/Wenham area right under her nose, such that she would be unknown in Boston all these years and still be in the area to reappear and remarry Johnathan Moulton in 1713. How would this work? Could it be possible that Spencer took her in and mom didn't even know about it? Or that she hid in Roxbury all these years, while the Puritan establishment looked the other way from an out-of-wedlock child?

She could have moved to Ipswich/Wenham/Salem just to get away from the limelight, for her own safety, with this having nothing to do with the parenthood of her child, who still could have been anyone. This now is my problem; I really don't know what would be more likely given the customs of Puritan New England where out-of-wedlock births were still scandalous and highly frowned upon if not illegal. People died for crimes like this. But there were other Williams in her life and other ways she could have got up there as well. It seems counter-intuitive to investigate how someone could move to the Salem/Ipswich/Wenham area at the time of the witch trials, but a huge glut of new research has appeared about that era and research on the Whiteridge family in particular is much more abundant than it ever used to be.

I can say that really I have several theories: 1) that she and her step-aunt Sarah Leverett brought up the child in Roxbury, in hiding and in secrecy, and she came to Wenham only later when it was time to find Johnathan and remarry (there was a William in Sarah's life, too, a grandfather, and Sarah was missing and out of the limelight for about twenty years around then, so she could have simply had a child, brought it up in Roxbury, and then reappeared in Puritan society later to marry; she was roughly the same age as Mary and was the youngest of the Governor's daughters). In this theory Mary and the step-aunt brought up the child together, and used the sprawling Roxbury property to hide, so William felt right at home when he married and started his family there, though I maintain he could only have found his Mary Whiteridge in Wenham or he moved up there, with Mary, when she remarried, but would have preferred even then to have stayed in Roxbury. By this theory we still have to figure out what would make a woman move from Roxbury up to Wenham to even find her Johnathan Moulton, and this would be much later.

The Spencer Phips theory has her moving almost as soon as the child is born, and perhaps moving to Maine or Wenham, wherever Spencer was, whether the child was William's or not. Somebody had to take her in and there has to be a reasonable explanation or at the very least a way she could have brought up that child without society's direct condemnation; a frontier estate in Maine may have been a reasonable explanation. The unknown in this theory is William's wife, who was already a strong character. She had been accused of being a witch, and some say that it was only when the Governor saw he could lose his own wife in this witch trial process that he called off the whole thing. Why would she be accused of being a witch? Where was she at the time? Where was Spencer? I have some digging to do.

So on the edge here we can see a few other theories: 1) that the child was actually Sarah's; 2) that Spencer himself was more personally involved; 3) that another wealthy friend in the Ipswich/Salem/Wenham area was involved, and took her in/hid her for fifteen years; 4) that he actually was Hudson's child, but that Elizabeth, who stayed in Roxbury and died there many years later, was unable to care for him after a point, and so he fell into the hands of Mary, or Sarah, or someone who could have taken him to Wenham before he was old enough to return, on his own, to Roxbury. All of these theories are worth investigating.