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.

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.

I'm writing this to clarify what I'm looking for. You can read down the following posts and catch up to my quest. I will eventually organize this blog so you can find whatever you're looking for, more easily, on top.

William Laverich married Mary Whittridge in Boston in 1715; the following year William Leverit and Mary Whittridge had a baby Phebee in Boston. Almost all the Whittridges, and the name can be spelled at least a dozen ways, are on the north shore of Boston: Salem, Ipswich, Gloucester, Topsfield, Wenham. A Mary Leverett married a Johnathan Moulton, in Wenham, May 31, 1713; she died in Wenham in 1728. She is listed as his second wife, by the way; he brought three children into the marriage (1700, 1702, and 1712), born before his first wife died, presumably in childbirth. If she brought one child into the marriage that would make more sense, although William would be clearly about ready to leave Wenham anyway.

OK so assuming this is our Mary, born 1674 (I think), full sister to John, she could have moved up to Wenham anytime before 1713, not necessarily when William was young. William I would have to assume was born before 1698, in order to be 17 at his marriage. Mary Whittridge, similarly, would probably be about that age in order to make your usual kind of Puritan situation, where both kids marry young and have a child right away. Naturally I can find no Marys born in 1698 but I haven't checked all 15 spellings of Whittridge.

And the Mary Whitredge who was acquitted in the witch trials remarried Benjamin Proctor; her children Silvester and Prudence dropped from sight, being 4 and 6 when she was thrown in jail, and I don't know if they were raised by the Proctors or what. I can see Prudence (1686) coming to Boston at the age of 29 and marrying William no matter what his age, but there are dozens of Whittridges around so you wouldn't have to rely on one ditching the name Prudence for a more circumspect name. I wouldn't put it past anyone, though.

Prudence Witherage (1686)

OK, so it was a long shot. My question was whether this poor girl had any relation to the Mary Whittridge who walked into the Boston Public Records office and announced her marriage to William Leveridge in 1715, and the following year, had a baby named Phebee, with him calling himself Leverit now. He could be one of ours, and could have had another William in a few years, and if so, she's one of ours too, but where did she come from? I thought maybe she'd be connected to Prudence.

Prudence (1686) was a six-year-old girl when her mother was jailed for witchcraft as part of the Salem witch trials. Her brother Silvester was four. Their father Silvester was dead; her mother was a widow. She was acquitted and released, but had to pay for her time in jail and it broke her. She ended up marrying Benjamin Proctor, and maybe that's an avenue of finding what happened to the kids.

The heck of it is, neither kid was ever seen again, that I know of. Now it's true that the name can be spelled a dozen or more ways, and I've only tried one or two. It's also true that the web might not be the only place to look. But the fact is, they dropped off the face of the earth. And the father, Silvester, he also is a total unknown.

Now the Witherage family got excited recently when Mary's name turned up among the people caught up in the witch trials. Especially since she lived, and had children, and had more even, after she got out of jail. But it was dead ends all around, when it came to finding her Witherage children, or the roots of the man she'd married, Silvester of Marblehead.

In my case I have to admit that it was a long shot in the first place, thinking I could find better evidence of who the Mary was that walked into that office in Boston. It turns out a lot of people are missing, or unaccounted for, or of unknown origin. Records just aren't that clear. What they have, has been saved carefully and made very accessible. I think those small towns, Salem, Wenham, Ipswich, Marblehead, etc. have all done the best they could in that regard. But lots of times it's a fire or a storm that destroys what paper there is and then, voila, it's gone. No record of where this guy came from. We'll just have to live with it.

Ipswich Mary revisited

OK here's an update on my theory and all the work I've been doing to tie loose ends together. The possibility of my family being connected to the witch trials is the latest thing that has me excited.

Let's start by clearing up an earlier problem. A Mary Leverett who died in Cambridge in 1699 was not our Mary, but rather Mary Leverett Dudley/Townsend, a daughter of Governor John. This Mary is often considered to be a daughter of John the Younger, because she died in Cambridge right before he had a string of children there, many of whom died also. John did have a daughter Mary soon after who lived and went on to have ten children herself, but she outlived maybe seven of them. She is not our Mary.

Our Mary was born in 1674, I believe, named in Hudson's will in 1692 as a daughter, and disappeared after that. A Mary Leverett appeared in Salem, marrying a Johnathan Moulton, who already had children, in 1798; a Mary Leverett died in Wenham in 1712. I believe this is the same Mary and this Mary could have been the mother of our William (~1692), who would have been born around the time of the witch trials.

A William Laverick married a Mary Whiteridge in Boston in 1710, and a William Leverit, with a wife Mary, had a child Phebee the following year. We have long suspected that this William was an ancestor, had another child named William ~1727, another child named Mary, possibly in Chelsea around that time, and simply stayed off the record books. I would like to connect this William and this Mary Whiteridge to someone. Where did they come from?

It turns out that the vast majority of Whitridges are from the Salem/Ipswich area. There are over a dozen spellings of the name, to the point that I get careless myself in using them. It can start with Wi- or Wh- which makes scrolling through birth, death and marriage records more difficult. But all of them are in the north shore area. Gloucester, Marblehead, Salem, Ipswich, Wenham, they're all over the place. Boston, none. That's what I've found so far.

A Mary Whiterage was involved in the witch trials. Over 150 people were arrested and awaiting trial when Governor Phips called the whole thing off and offered them pardons (see below post). One of these was a Mary Whiterage, a widow with two young children, Silvester and Prudence. This Mary spent months in jail, and, when released, had to pay fines covering her stay; the fines broke the family. Her children disappeared; nobody knows what happened to Silvester or Prudence, though they both went off into the new century carrying the Whiteredge name. Mary herself remarried into the Proctor family, made famous by the witch trials. Mom may have brought the two children into the new marriage or maybe not. Who knows what happened to them when their mother and grandmother were in jail for witchcraft.

Prudence could be the Mary who appeared in Boston in 1710. It was some Mary Whiteridge who can't be accounted for in any other way, and she had to have come from somewhere. She almost certainly came from the north shore, though, as every Whiteridge at the time did.

In that case this is what I'm looking for: A way William could have grown up on the north shore, coming of age around 1710 or before; a family account that would show what happened to Prudence or Silvester, during or after the witch trials; a William or a reason Mary would name her boy William, either after someone who sheltered her, or someone who fathered the baby; a family with a Phebee in it, that would give Mary Whiteridge some reason to name her first daughter Phebee, instead of, say, Mary.

Mary Whitteridge and the witch trials

Leverett genealogists have been interested in a Mary Whitteridge since she appeared marrying William Leverich in Boston in 1715. The following year a William Leverit and Mary Whitteridge had a daughter Phebee in Boston. These may seem like random events, but there weren't many Leveretts around those days, and a William who appeared later, born in about 1727, could have come from this family.

In searching for who Mary Whitteridge could be, the trail leads directly to Ipswich. The Ipswich area was full of Whitteridges, and the name was spelled at least a half-dozen ways, maybe a dozen. Perhaps the most interesting of them was the Mary Whitheridge of this article. She was jailed in 1692, then acquitted, but had to pay court fees, which broke her (and her mother, Sarah Buckley). She then married Benjamin Proctor of the famous family involved in the witch trials.

One thing that is interesting is that she had two little children, at the time she was jailed, but neither of them was a Mary. One was Prudence Whittredge (1686) and the other was Silvester (1688). They would have been 6 and 4 when she was jailed, and they fell completely out of sight afterward, as did her mother, Sarah Buckley. She, Mary Buckley, had married a guy named Sylvester Whittredge from Marblehead, and had those two children, but he had died.

A couple of patterns I've found here are these. First, the spellings of Whitridge/Whitterage/Witherage/Whitered etc. are all over the map. There are at least a dozen of them. There are many people in this family but all of them that I can tell are in that north shore area, Ipswich, Gloucester, Marblehead, Danvers, etc. There are none in or from Boston or anywhere else. Second, the records aren't really all that clear. A couple of Whittridge men came early, like in 1635, so many of the people in the family are descended from them, and there are quite a few by 1692. But there is no information about who Sylvester's parents were. Ipswich wasn't as organized as Boston was at that time.

So what are the chances that the child, Prudence, ended up in Boston calling herself Mary? Well, somebody did, and it wasn't someone from Boston. I have come to believe that William himself, who was probably a Leverett based on what he called himself when he had Phebee, was from Ipswich too. I feel that if he was in Boston, people would have known about it. This doesn't explain how he got up there, with his mother, especially before or during the witch trials, but remember that a Mary Leverett was found in Salem marrying a Johnathan Moulton in 1708, and died in Wenham soon after. I might have my dates wrong here but there aren't many Mary Leveretts around, and it was unlikely that Ipswich/Salem was getting new ones from England or the South around that time. This Mary Leverett would I believe be John Leverett the Younger's full sister, born 1674, and she would have had to move to Ipswich herself with the baby around 1690, but actually could have moved up there at any time. I cannot explain why she would move up there, but a witch trial in Boston (1688) and an out-of-wedlock baby might explain something. Ipswich was a place where people weren't keeping such good track of such things, obviously. And her brother married into a powerful Ipswich family (1697); her sister (or half-sister, anyway) had already married into another one. They knew people in Ipswich; it wasn't Boston; those were two good reasons. Who knew that the place would become famous in the witch trials? Or that, nowadays, all kinds of research would be done on the Mary Whitteridge of the witch trials, and the 150 other people who were due to be hung, but who were pardoned and freed by Governor Phips? Perhaps long-lost records of Ipswich/Salem will pop up soon, in the process of doing the vigorous research people are doing.