Week # 10 - Deborah Willard ( < 14 Sep 1645 - 13 May 1721)
An ancestor a week for 52 Weeks! #52ancestors
Deborah Willard, our 6th great grandmother, is the child of a migrant to the Colonies. I have been writing about children of migrants for 10 weeks now. One interesting fact about Deborah is that we don't know her mother's name. There have been speculations that mother was Dorothy Dunster but no records are showing up to prove either her given name, Dorothy, or that her father was a Dunster. Harvard College President Henry Dunster made a reference in his 1658 will to his sister Willard of Concord. For years genealogists have puzzled over who that sister might be.
So failing our effort to know her mother's name we are pretty sure that her father was George Willard (1614-1656) who came to the colonies about 1638. There are two sources for George's information in the Puritan Great Migration- Plymouth Colony Records [1] and Willard Genealogy by Joseph Willard and Charles Wilkes Walker [2]. Scituate plantation was composed chiefly of men from Kent with their minister John Lothrop. We later find that same minister in Barnstable.
On page 11 of the Willard genealogy we see Baptisms in the Second Church of Scituate by the minister William Wetherell, Anno 1645 Deborah ye daughter of George Willard on Sept. 14 so we know Deborah was born before that. Children were often baptised within a few years of their birth and often together as a family like Deborah and her brother Daniel. "The two Willard children baptised that day were probably all that the Willard family then had." George is later found in Maryland, "the home of real Christian liberty."
We know that Deborah moves to Barnstable county because it is there that she meets and marries our 6th Great grandfather Paul Sears (1637-1708) probably about 1658, the year before their first child is born. If Deborah was 20 years old when she had her first child then she was probably born 1639 soon after her father arrived in Scituate. She would have been just a year younger than her husband Paul. Deborah and Paul live in the east precinct of Yarmouth at what is now East Dennis. In the map, circa 1700 below you can see a cross in the middle of the map denoting the Ancient Sears Cemetery and just a little north and east of that, the homestead of Paul Sears and Deborah Willard as imagined by Prof Jim Gould. The land lies between Quivett Creek and what is now Route 6A, the Old King's Highway.
It is on this piece of land that Deborah [3] raised her ten children. We are descended from two of them.
Mercy (1659), Bethiah (5th great grandmother)(1662)(wife of John Crowell who we just wrote about), Samuel (1664), Lydia (1666), Paul II (5th great grandfather)(1669), Mary (1672), Ann (1675), John (1678), Richard (1680) and Daniel (1682). In the map we can find the homesteads of John, Daniel, Paul II, Samuel nearby so the kids were never far from home. They could stop by for a piece of Mom's clam pie just about anytime they wished?
[1] Plymouth Colony Records - 1 Feb 1638- Inhabitant of Scituate took the oath of allegience to the King. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t3mw31739&view=2up&seq=132
[2] Willard Genealogy - https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4446481&view=2up&seq=32
[3] Wikitree profile for Deborah Willard https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Willard-17
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