Jonathan Brewster

Jonathan Brewster, eldest son of Elder William Brewster of the Mayflower. Born at Scrooby in 1593, he went with his parents to Holland, where he was a ribbon-maker at Leiden, was admitted a citizen in 1617 as "Jonathan William's son," and buried a wife on 10 May 1619 (source). He did not come in the Mayflower but followed in the Fortune, which reached Plymouth in November 1621, the ship that also brought Thomas Prence, who married his sister Patience. On 10 April 1624 he married Lucretia Oldham of Derby.

About 1630 he moved to Duxbury, which he represented as deputy in 1639 and 1641-44. Winsor's history of Duxbury calls him "one of the principal men in the formation of its settlement, and in the establishment of its church; he sometimes practised before the Court as an attorney, and is also styled gentleman." He was a military commissioner in the Pequot War of 1637, on the committee to raise forces in the Narragansett alarm of 1642, and in Myles Standish's Duxbury company in 1643. As master of a small coasting vessel trading to Virginia he came to know Pequot Harbor, and about 1649 he settled at New London, where he was "Clarke of the Towne of Pequitt" in 1649 and kept a trading-house with the Mohegans. On 25 April 1650 Uncas gave him the neck that still bears his name, the deed binding him "to keep a house for trading goods with the Indians." He was a deputy to the Connecticut General Court in 1650 and 1655-58. In September 1656 he wrote that he and his whole family "resolved for old England" the next year, but he died in Connecticut on 7 Aug 1659 and was buried at Brewster's Neck, where his descendants put up a granite shaft in 1855: "History speaks of his acts." His wife Lucretia, nurse and midwife to the town, "an attendant upon the sick and dying," survived him twenty years (source).

His children, as he entered them in the Brewster Book: William (1625), Mary (1627, wife of John Turner of Scituate), Jonathan, Ruth (1631, wife of John Pickett and then of Charles Hill), Benjamin (1633), Elizabeth (1637, wife of Peter Bradley and then of Christopher Christophers), Grace (1639) and Hannah (1641).

Research: Notable connections of Patricia Hatten (1940-2009): the paternal Hatten line.