Elizabeth Walker

Came on the Anne in 1623 with her five daughters, from Baldock and Great Amwell, Hertfordshire. A widow from 1628, she lived another forty-five years as “Widow Warren”: “widow Waren” by 1629 (PCR 12:7), and taxed as “Widow Warren” in 1633 and 1634. In 1635 her servant Thomas Williams, when “shee, after other things, exhorted him to fear God & doe his duty,” answered that “he neither feared God, nor the diuell”; the court let him off with a reproof (PCR 1:35). In 1635/6 Thomas Clarke sued her over his boat, borrowed and “lost in ye Eele Riuer … by an extraordinary storme”; the jury acquitted her but awarded him 30s (PCR 1:36). On 7 Mar 1636/7 the court made “Elizabeth Warren, widdow, the relict of Mr Richard Warren” a Purchaser in her late husband’s place, “as well because that (hee dying before he had pformed the said bargaine) the said Elizabeth pformed the same after his decease,” and to secure the lands she had given “vnto her sonnes in law, Richard Church, Robert Bartlett, and Thomas Little” (PCR 1:54). In 1652 the court again confirmed that she “had power soe to doe” (PCR 3:19-20).

As “Mrs Elizabeth Warren of the Eele Riuer Widdow” she gave John Cooke, on his marriage to her daughter Sarah, 18 acres at Eel River “on the North side of Robert Bartletts lott” (PCR 12:27). On 9 Jan 1639/40 she gave Anthony Snow, husband of her daughter Abigail, “All that her house scituate nere the place called Wellingsly (alias) Hobs Hole wth the eight acrees of land” (PCR 12:53-54). Mary Ring left “mrs Warren one woodden cupp with a foote as a token of my love” (1631); Stephen Hopkins’s “great Bull” was in her hands in 1644; she had a whole share in the Dartmouth purchase (1652/3).

That the Elizabeth Walker baptised at Baldock in 1583 and married at Great Amwell in 1610 is the Mayflower widow rests on Davies’s argument from her father’s will (TAG 78, 2003), now the accepted identification.

Her mother’s name is unknown: her father’s wife at his death, Mary Stringer, married him only in 1597. Mollie’s “75 grandchildren” is in no contemporary record; the Mayflower Society counts 56. On 4 Mar 1673/4, after her daughters had released their claims, her estate was settled on her son Joseph (PCR 5:139-40).

The family descends from her twice, through her daughter Mary (Warren) Bartlett.

Matrilineal mtDNA: H1j10a, found in tested matrilineal descendants of three daughters: Sarah (six testers), Ann (one) and Mary (one), the last through Rebecca (Bartlett) Harlow (Mayflower DNA wiki, 2023) [compiled].