My winter social schedule was enlivened recently with a talk given by one of my favorite speakers, Peg Baker of Plymouth. She and her husband, Jim Baker, are well known for their vast expertise in all things Pilgrim. Peg is Director Emeritus of The Pilgrim Society in Plymouth and compiler of the just released and completely revised edition of Mayflower Families Through Five Generations on Pilgrim Thomas Rogers, published by the General Society of Mayflower Descendants.
Peg’s lecture was relevant to what I’ve been talking about lately in this blog – inventories and what you can learn about people from them. In this case, her subject “One Woman’s Wardrobe” developed out of the inventory of a descendant of Thomas Rogers. The will of Anna (Tisdale) (Leonard) Thomas (1672-1733) was extraordinary because she had a living husband, her second, who had given her a “pre-nup.” that allowed her to devise her property by her own will at a time when most women had no property of their own. (Widows usually received their husband’s property for their lifetime only, after which it was distributed as directed in his will.) Anna, who was the mother of eleven children and grandmother of forty-one, made very specific bequests of her clothing to her three daughters, and, best of all, the estate inventory contains detailed itemizations of the clothing. Peg began to wonder what Anna’s clothes would have looked like, and she’s gathered a great visual presentation of 17th and 18th century women’s fashions. If you have a chance to hear Peg on any subject, I recommend you take it.
The morning after Peg’s lecture, while I was working on the Early New England Families sketch for George Woodward of Watertown, I received a copy of the inventory of his daughter Susannah Woodward’s estate. Susannah’s story will be told in more detail in that sketch, but in short, she died at the age of 25, unmarried, having been the mother of an illegitimate child at age 19. (The child was apparently “put out.”) Thanks to Peg’s lecture, I could recognize that Susannah had a very complete wardrobe, including several coats, two hats, a green apron, one waistcoat and two pair of bodices, two silk hoods, two neck handkerchiefs, etc. The total value of her estate was £9.5.18. This inevitably makes one wonder who was supporting her (or how she was supporting herself)?
