Research Notes:
Mahler discusses the family origin of Jane (Galland) (Paine) Mayhew. [1]
In the Records of the Commissioners for the United Colonies, there appeared a letter, now in the Connecticut Archives, [2] Conn. Col. Records, 1678-1689. pp. 504 - 506.] written by Governor Mayhew, sealed with arms which, upon examination, proved to be the arms, with a mullet for difference, of the Mayhew family of Dinton, Wiltshire, a county family of considerable distinction. These facts, taken in connection with the bestowal by Mayhew of the names of Tisbury and Chilmark on two adjoining towns on Martha's Vineyard, (the latter settlement having been originally chartered as Tisbury Manor), and the fact that Tisbury and Chilmark are adjoining parishes in Wiltshire, and separated by a few miles only from Dinton, made it quite evident that this locality was the one which should reveal his family connection. [2]
The Great Migration reports [3]:
Thomas Mayhew
Origin: Tisbury, Wiltshire
Migration: 1632
First Residence: Medford
Removes: Watertown by 1634, Martha's Vineyard by 1647Occupation: Steward. Magistrate.
Church membership: Admission to Watertown church prior to 14 May 1634 implied by freemanship.
Freeman: 14 May 1634 (as "Mr. Tho[mas] Mahewe") [MBCR 1:369].
Education: His letters to the Winthrops were direct and full of practical business matters [WP 3:169, 6:136]
Offices: Watertown selectman, 10 October 1636, 30 December 1637, 10 December 1638, 6 December 1639, 29 December 1640, 21 November 1642 [WaTR 2, 3, 5, 6, 8]. Assessor, 20 December 1642 [WaVR 9]. Arbiter, 30 June 1648 [Aspinwall 135]. Appraiser of land, 10 September 1643 [Aspinwall 136].
(Further details of his life and offices, which are, as Banks said, "interwoven with the political and social conditions of the Island," may be found in Martha's Vineyard Hist 1:104-26, 2:30, 3:299-301].)Estate: Granted Great Dividend of eighty acres at Watertown, 25 July 1636 [WaBOP 4]. Granted Beaverbrook Plowlands of thirty acres, 28 February 1636/7 [WaBOP 7]. Granted Remote Meadows of thirty acres, 26 June 1637 [WaBOP 10].
In the Watertown Inventory of Grants "Thomas Maihue" held five parcels: "ten acres of upland ... with a pond in it"; thirty acres of plowland in the Further Plain; eighty acres of upland being a Great Dividend; thirty acres in the Remote Meadows; and thirty-one acres and a half beyond the Further Plain [WaBOP 73]. In the Composite Inventory "Thomas Maihew" held six parcels, being the five in the Inventory of Grants, to which is added "a farm of two hundred and fifty acres" [WaBOP 19].
On 8 May 1653 in the first division of common land at Edgartown, Mr. Mayhew received lot number 14 [ Martha's Vineyard Hist 2:26]. Following this, he received his proportion in all subsequent divisions.
In his will, dated 16 June 1681 and proved 28 March 1682, "Thomas Mayhew of Edgartown upon the Vineyard in this ninetieth year of my age" divided his extensive lands on Martha's Vineyard and elsewhere among "Matthew Mayhew, my grandson" (with conditional provisions for "Thomas and John Mayhew, Jerusha and Jedidah"), "my daughter Hannah" and "her sons Samuel, John and Joshua Daggett," "my daughter Martha," "Thomas and John Harlock, and their sister at Boston," naming also to "my son Daggett" and "my son Tupper" [ DukesLR A:326-32].Birth: Baptized 1 April 1593 at Tisbury, Wiltshire, son of Matthew and Alice (Barter) Mayhew [Gen Adv 4:1-8].
Death: Martha's Vineyard 25 March 1682 [Gen Adv 4:4].
Marriage: (1) By about 1620 _____ _____; she died before 1635.
(2) Jane (Gallion) Paine, widow of Thomas Paine, London merchant [ TAG 61:256; Lechford 184-86, 240; Aspinwall 14, 35, 111; Martha's Vineyard Hist 300]. She died after 1666 but before her husband.Children:
With first wifei Thomas, born say 1620; m. by about 1648 Jane _____ [ Martha's Vineyard Hist 3:301-02; see Comments below].
With second wife
ii Hannah, born 15 June 1635 [WaVR 4]; m. by about 1652 Thomas Doggett, son of John Doggett .iii Bethiah, born 6 December 1636 [WaVR 4]; m. (1) by 1658 Thomas Harlock [ Martha's Vineyard Hist 2:72]; m. (2) by 1677 as his second wife Richard Way (child born Boston 13 July 1677 [BVR 143]); she d. by 1678 [ TAG 61:256].
iv Mary, born 14 January 1639[/40] [WaVR 7]; no further record (unless she is the same as Martha below).
v Martha, born say 1641; m. Sandwich 27 December 1661 Thomas Tupper [MD 14:69].
Associations: Thomas Macey of Nantucket called Thomas Mayhew his "honored cousin" [Martha's Vineyard Hist 3:301]. A Thomas Mayhew of Southampton was apprenticed to Richard Masey, merchant, and was admitted a free commoner of that town on 9 February 1620[/1] [Martha's Vineyard Hist 300].
Comments: The first documented appearance of Thomas Mayhew in New England was on 7 November 1632, under the disguise of "Mr. Mavericke Junior" [MBCR 1:101]. On that date, he, Mr. Alcocke and Mr. Turner were commissioned by the General Court to settle a boundary dispute between Cambridge and Charlestown. When they completed their duties, they reported back to the Court, and their report was recorded in two separate places in the records, in slightly different form. The first time it is entered on its own leaf, and out of chronological sequence [MBCR 1:94-95]; on this occasion the signatures of the members of the committee are appended: "Tho: Mayhewe, Nath: Turner, George Alcocke." The second version is shorter, but in the right place chronologically [ MBCR 1:102]. Redating the earlier version of this document removes the presumed evidence for Mayhew's arrival in 1631, the date stated by both Savage and Pope.
The likelihood that Thomas Mayhew came to New England in 1632 raises an interesting possibility, based on an Admiralty suit of that year. In the case of Mason v. Gibbs, two sailors testified that the Lyon's Whelp sailed from England in January 1631/2 and arrived at the Isles of Shoals in May 1632, and carried as its only passengers "a man and his wife, their two daughters and their man," and one of the sailors added that this nameless family "were embarked for New England on behalf of Matthew Craddock" [English Adventurers 37-38]. Thomas Mayhew is known to have come to New England as Matthew Craddock's steward [ Martha's Vineyard Hist 1:117-26].
About 1640 Mr. Valentine Hill of Boston, merchant, and Mr. Thomas Mayhew of Watertown, gentleman, agreed to an arbitration of their troubles [ Lechford 350]. On 10 March 1649[/50] Mr. Bruen informed his friend Mr. John Birke that Mr. Thomas Mayhew was in his debt for twenty thousand of pipe staves [ Aspinwall 244-45].
In 1901 Charles Edward Banks published the English ancestry of Gov. Thomas Mayhew [ Gen Adv 4:1-8].
Lechford records several documents in which Thomas Mayhew and his wife Jane Mayhew, formerly the wife of Thomas Paine of London, act as guardians for Thomas Paine, Jane's son with her first husband [Lechford 184-86, 240]. Savage introduced confusion by stating that the widow Paine bore the Christian name "Grace" rather than Jane [Savage 3:185]. It may be this confusion that led him to state that the wife of the younger Thomas Mayhew was Jane Paine, allegedly daughter of this non-existent Grace, and therefore his stepsister.
Edward Everett Hale Jr., Lechford's editor, showed that Grace did not exist, and also that, based on the documents in Lechford, there is no evidence that the younger Thomas married a stepsister named Jane Paine [Lechford 184].
[1] Leslie Mahler, "The English Origin of Jane (Galland) (Paine) Mayhew." The American Genealogist 76 (2001), 94-98, [AmericanAncestors].
[2] Charles Edward Banks, History of Martha's Vineyard, Dukes County, Massachusetts, Vol. 3 (Edgartown, Massachusetts: Dukes County Historical Society, 1966), 298 - 328.
[3] Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633 (Boston, Massachusetts: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995), 1243, [AmericanAncestors].