Ipswich Mary

Followers of this blog and my work on the early Leveretts know that I believe that the secret of our lost ancestorship lies in unraveling the mystery of Ipswich Mary, who I believe was the sister of John Leverett, President of Harvard, and probably the mother of William and a string of Williams going right up to the William who died in Boston in the early 1800's, leaving his wife to send Joseph up to Maine where he would lose touch with most relatives except for his Aunt Walker, and grow up in the country near what's now Livermore Falls.

Back to Mary: she was the full sister of John, president of Harvard, and therefore her father was Hudson and mother was Sarah Peyton. Sarah was sick most of her life, and when Hudson remarried Elizabeth Gannett they moved out to Brookline/Brighton, which was way out in the country, and disappeared. Mary would have been a stepdaughter in this situation, though her brother John was already on his way to Harvard and fame, being about 18 when Hudson remarried. My first job would be to put a very accurate timeline onto this picture, because being out in Brookline/Brighton everyone disappeared, and the stepmother Elizabeth, who probably had his son Thomas the Barber, was never quite accepted by the Puritans downtown (she was of Pilgrim stock), and never wanted to live downtown with the high-society world that had brought up John. So here's Mary, stepdaughter, out in the country, then disappeared, completely.

I believe she's the Mary who reappeared and married a farmer, Johnathan Moulton, in Wenham in 1713 (that's up by Ipswich), and that she might have had the William who was founder of our line. He would be the first of several Williams. He would be the one who married Mary Whiteridge (many spellings) and one thing you can say about her was that there were hundreds of Whiteridges up on the north coast, and almost none in Boston, so to me it's very likely he grew up up there, met her, married her and moved to the family country estate and from there to Chelsea, or perhaps his son did.

There could be several Williams between that one (who would have been born in the late 1600s) and the one who grew up in Chelsea and Medford in time to marry Rachel Watts in 1740 at the age of about 16. That William, founder of our line, could only say that he was born in Boston, and we know that when he died on his farm in Needham, father of eleven, family members brought him back to Medford to be buried. He had apparently grown up among some Leveretts who were sons of Knight, son of Thomas the Barber, by that time undisputed carrier of the Leverett name.

To get back to Mary, she would need a reason to move to the north coast, and I believe her reason is to get away from Boston with her out-of-wedlock William and hide until he could grow up. I suspect Spencer Phipps, son of William, who died around the late 1600's, but the reason I suspect him is that John, in dividing his Lincolnshire Patent, gave one share to all his step-aunts (six altogether) but two for himself, and two for Spencer. Could it be that Spencer had harbored Mary and her child, up there in Ipswich, all those years? Or that William, a very colorful character of the late 1600s, was actually the father (he died right around then) or at least involved enough in getting Mary up there to safety, that she would name her son after him? I suspect. I have absolutely no proof. BBut the geography alone is very interesting. And the fact that Wihiteridge/Whitridges are almost uniformly from up there.

I'll say it again: I have absolutely no proof yet. The coincidences pile up and seem to beg for me to do more research. The Otis/Hodge theory of ~1960 says that the ancestor was a late child of Hudson's, born after his will but right before his death in about 1694, but I don't buy that. The reason they even needed that theory is that it was well known that William the Needham farmer was descended from John the Governor but not John of Harvard. OK. But family members placed their ancestry through Thomas the Barber, Knight, and hone of is sons, the last of whom could not have been father of William the Needham farmer. They had some facts wrong, it's just. a question of how many.

For now the facts remain: We don't know who William the Needham farmer's parents were, so we can't establish for certain the connection to Hudson. We know that the ancestor line as given by Joseph and his brothers cannot be totally accurate though they could have come through Thomas the Barber and Knight. We also know that Knight's boys, Colonel John and Thomas the printer, took in some stray Leveretts from around town as they were both wealthy enough to do it, especially Thomas the printer, who printed grammar primers (among other things), made good money, and lived in privacy somewhere in Medford. To me, it's likely that a young William, born in Chelsea or perhaps Brookline/Brighton, was taken in by that Medford family until he came of age and ended up in Needham.

It was the times of hardship: starvation, privation, blockade, no food or goods entering Boston. One can't blame him for hightailing it out to Needham where there was more room and one could grow a potato. He joined the Revolution as an officer, but didn't get paid well, and his son William took to drink and moved to town.

All of this is in Eighteenth Century Leveretts but that book needs updating, mostly so I can do more research on the characters above.