Janet and Robert Wolfe Genealogy --- Go to Genealogy Page for William Harlow --- Go to Genealogy Page for Mary Faunce

Notes for William Harlow and Mary Faunce

"Savage and Pope were wrong in their treatment of William Harlow and were corrected by George Ernest Bowman, 'Sergeant William Harlow of Plymouth and William Harlow of Sandwich Were Not the Same Person,' MD 12:193. The William Harlow of Plymouth town died 25 August 1691 in his sixty-seventh year (Ply. Town Recs. 1:202; Ply. Ch. Recs. 1:271), and thus was born ca. 1624. He was on the 1643 ATBA for Plymouth; he was a grandjuror on 7 June 1653 (PCR 3:32); and he became a freeman on 6 June 1654 (PCR 3:48). In 1656 he was a highway surveyor for Plymouth, and in 1661 he was a constable for Plymouth (PCR 3:100, 215). He was among those granted land on 3 June 1662 at Taunton (PCR 4:20). By the late 1660s he was known as Sergeant Harlow. On 1 June 1669 Sgt. William Harlow was a selectman for Plymouth (PCR 5:19), and on 15 September 1673 he became a deputy (PCR 5:135).

He married (1) on 20 December 1649 Rebecca Bartlett, daughter of Robert Bartlett and his wife Mary Warren (daughter of Richard Warren); (2) 15 July 1658 Mary Faunce, daughter of John Faunce; and (3) 25 January 1665/66 Mary Shelley (PCR 8:8, 21, 26). In the settlement of his estate, dated 9 September 1691, his widow is Mary Harlow, and his surviving children are sons Samuel, William, Nathaniel, and Benjamin, and seven unnamed daughters (MD 12:195). On 12 April 1667 Sgt. William Harlow made an agreement with Secretary Nathaniel Morton and his wife Lydia to put out his son Nathaniel Harlow, near two and one-half years old, with the Mortons until he was twenty-one (PCR 5:10). The agreement between Harlow and Morton showed that the Mortons "desired" the child, and it provided that in case Nathaniel Morton died before the child was seven years old, William Harlow would pay £10 to Lydia Morton to help in the maintenance of the child. Nathaniel Morton in his 1685 will gave a young cow and calf to his kinsman Nathaniel Harlow, son of William, and requested his loving kinsman Sgt. William Harlow to be a supervisor of his will (Ply. Colony LR 5:350). The kinship between Harlow and Morton would have been through Harlow's second wife, Mary Faunce, whose mother, Patience Morton, was a sister of Nathaniel Morton, and thus Nathaniel Harlow would have been Nathaniel Morton's nephew.

William Harlow's children by his first wife were William, Samuel, Rebecca, and William; by his second wife, Mary, Repentance, John, and Nathaniel; and by his third wife Hannah, Bathsheba, Joanna, Mehitabel, Judith, and Benjamin (MD 12:195). An early article, Theodore P. Adams, "The Harlow Family," NEHGR 14:227, is undocumented and has known errors. The house of William Harlow is still standing in Plymouth and may be visited during the summer; it is said to contain original beams from Plymouth's first meetinghouse-fort, and is known as the "Harlow Old Fort House." [1]


Footnotes:

[1] Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony: Its History and People 1620-1691 (Salt Lake City, UT: Ancestry Incorporated, 1986), 298, [GoogleBooks].