Martha Rowlandson

Martha was born at Salisbury on 24 August 1666, a twin, daughter of Thomas Rowlandson and Dorothy Portland (record). Her father was a brother of Rev. Joseph Rowlandson of Lancaster, husband of Mary Rowlandson, the author of the captivity narrative of 1682 (Savage; Hoyt), so Mary Rowlandson was very probably her aunt by marriage.

King Philip's War. The war struck her family in its first winter. Her brother Thomas, nineteen, was at Lancaster when the Rowlandsons' garrison house was attacked on 10 February 1675/6, and was killed there, "nephew of the minister" (source); he is in the list of those "Killed in the Assault," "Thomas Rowlandson, aged 19" (Soldiers in King Philip's War, p. 353). Martha and her sister Elizabeth later married two brothers who had both served in the war: her husband Ralph, probably at the Great Swamp Fight of 1675, and John at Wells in Maine, where his right hand was shattered, most likely in the spring of 1677 (see Ralph Ellinwood and John Ellinwood).

The Salisbury births record a son of hers before her marriage, "Sam[ue]ll, s. Martha [Rolenson], Jan. 12, 1686 [1687]," who died eight days later (record). By 1691 she was "of Beverly," probably living near her married sister Elizabeth at Bass River, and on 19 August 1691 she married Ralph Ellinwood II at Marblehead: "Ralph [Ellinwood], and Martha Rowlandson of Beverly" (record). The Beverly town record of their daughter Return's birth names her: "Return, d. Ralph and Marthew" (record).

She was living on 8 April 1706, when an agreement about her father's estate named "Ralph Elenwood and Martha his wife" among his children, with John Ellenwood, her husband's brother, who had married her sister Elizabeth in 1684/5 (source).

Open questions

• The estate papers of Thomas Rowlandson the elder (Lancaster, 1657; Middlesex probate), to prove the Lancaster link; and the original 1706 agreement.
• Her death (the Ancestry tree has "1712").