Rebecca Wright

Wife of William Frost. Her first marriage, to Eleazer Leverich of Huntington, ended in what is believed to be the first divorce granted by the governor’s council of New York. Her father brought the case: in March 1669/70 Governor Lovelace wrote that he had received “a Peticon from Rebecka ye wife of Eleazer Leveredg of yo[ur] Towne by ye hands of her father Nicholas Wright,” and on 1 April 1670 he ordered a hearing because “Nicholas Wright of Oyster bay hath on ye behalfe of Rebeckah his daught[er] wife of Eleazer Leveridg of Huntington made Complaint unto me of ye uncomfortable condition wherein his said Daughter hath for diuers yeares past liued w[i]th her said husband” (record, pp. 43, 331-332). These papers are the documentary proof of her parentage. In October 1670 the council, “with ye Advice of Chirurgions well skill’d & Sober Matrons who privily Examyned both ye man & woman,” found “That ye defect was in ye husband & not in ye wife,” declared the marriage void, and gave her “free libertye to dispose of her selfe in Lawfull marriage”; Eleazer was ordered to pay her “twenty five pounds in living Cattle” for what she had brought to him (record).

She was married to William Frost by 20 May 1673, when her uncle Anthony Wright’s will left “To Rebecca ffrost, two shillings, six pence” (source, p. 37). The Frost Genealogy takes her to have been living in 1698, from a will of that year that speaks only of “my wife,” unnamed; that will may never have been proved, and in 1720 the widow who administered William Frost’s estate was Elinor (source, pp. 19-20). The trees’ birth at Sandwich in 1642 and death in 1717 have no source, though Sandwich is likely for a birth in the 1640s: “several of the children of Peter and Nicholas were born” there (Latting, p. 35).

Research: research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md.

Open questions

• Her birth and death. When she died, and whether Elinor, the widow of 1720, was a second wife.