Identifying the wives of Richard Brownson/Bronson/Brunson, early immigrant to Connecticut [closed]

Question

Multiple generations of duplicates for this family were recently created.  After spending several hours sorting them out, editing and submitting merges I'm trying to identify, prove or disprove the wives of immigrant Richard.  I've just started on it so haven't reviewed the "sources" in depth but if anybody has a bunch of clarifying data or analysis and just hasn't gotten around to entering it yet, now would be the time :)

Update: none of the sources that Torrey cited asserted a LNAB or origin for Elizabeth.  Why he thought she might have been Welbourne is a puzzle.  That was the name of Brownson's first wife based on a will by her sister Margaret (Welbourne) Pantry although there is a chance that "sister" meant "sister in law", I haven't researched the Welbourne and Pantry families that deeply.  I see nothing other than Torrey that asserts any last name for Elizabeth.

Meanwhile...Coddington in his TAG-38 article seems to be the best sourced and he also points out that there is no apparent proof of "Abigail" for the first name of Richard's first wife, although there is proof-ish of her surname of Welbourne/Wibourne/etc based on her purported sister's will.  Unless they were sisters-in-law... However, Coddington also asserts a wife between "Abigail" and Elizabeth Unknown and I can't tell why he thinks this, he cites no records or sources for this (literally) short-lived marriage that I can see.  And re: "Abigail", a privately published genealogy (2 of them but one probably relied on the other) asserted that "Abigail" joined the Farmington church in 1653.  I found that record and it says  "the wife of Richard Bronson", which obviously doesn't help at all.  It was shortly after this 1653 admission that his children started being baptized at the Farmington church, the oldest at 15 years age.

Update - my "most" current thinking (ha ha) is that there may have been a second totally unrecorded wife despite the fact that this requires yet more missing burial and marriage records.  I don't agree that the wording of "Abigail"'s sister's will in Sep 1651 indicated she was dead (...unto my sister Brunson her two children... vs. the more common "unto the children of my sister Brunson") but I do agree that the fact that she said her sister had two children when by Sep 1651 Richard in fact had four children, indicating the latter two were by a different wife.  Obviously this requires creating an "Unknown Unknown" profile for a second wife which is aggravating.

Answer 1

Brad,

I think I have seen the same sources that you mention.  My angle on this is that I have a descent from Richard’s daughter Hannah by his second wife, name unknown. After his second wife died Richard married Elizabeth (Wilbourne), about 1666. Elizabeth married 3 times: to David Carpenter, George Orvis, and Richard Bronson. I also have a descent from Elizabeth through the Carpenter liaison. Elizabeth was Richard Bronson’s third wife.

Marriage record, with NEHGS sources: CARPENTER, David (-1651?) & Elizabeth ____ (-1694), m/2 George ORVIS, m/3 Richard BRONSON; by 1644; Farmington, CT {Carpenter (1901) 6; Bronson 11; Orvis 12; Hartford Prob. 1:113, 228, 414; Frame-Dana 197; Reg. 11:326}

Per The Third Supplement to Torrey's New England Marriages, Richard married about 1642 in Hartford, a daughter of John Wyborne of England, supposedly named Abigail. They had two children, born 1643 and 1645. Abigail must have died shortly after 1645, because Richard married about 1646/7, in Farmington, an unknown woman. They had 6 children, including Hannah, born 1650, baptized 1653 (Ancestry.com. Connecticut, U.S., Church Record Abstracts, 1630-1920, v. 34, Farmington) Their last child was born in 1665, and Richard's wife may have died of complications from that birth, because in 1666 Richard married Elizabeth, sister of his first wife.

marriage records, with NEHGS sources:

BRONSON, Richard (-1687) & 1/wf Abigail WILBOURNE; 25 Nov 1619, by 1643; Hartford/Farmington, CT {Reg. 11:325; Sv. 1:280; Bronson 11; Sanford 92; Morris-Flynt 31; R. W. Cooke Chart; Bassett (1926) 133; Frame-Dana 197; Warner-Harrington 80} 

BRONSON, Richard (-1687) & 2/wf Elizabeth (WILBOURNE/ WEYBURN?) (CARPENTER) [ORVIS] (-1694), w David, w George (William PANTRY); aft 27 Apr 1664; Farmington, CT {Bronson 11; Orvis 12; TAG 9:58; Sv. 1:280, 336; Carpenter (1901) 6; Hartford Prob. 1:279, 414Through

My reasoning is that Richard’s first wife died young, and his marriage to Elizabeth was too late to account for his children, so there was an unknown second wife. The prevalence of widowed spouses marrying a sibling of the deceased was so common that it provides circumstantial evidence of the identity of Richard’s first wife.

I hope this helps.

Gregg

Comments

Thanks Gregg, I've got pretty extensive documentation on Richard and "Abigail" Weyborn-6 and Elizabeth "Weyborn-3" profiles of everything that is known and guessed (with several merges submitted).

A "brief" summary is that Coddington thought "Abigail" (and there is no proof of her first name) died by the 12 Sep 1651 will of her sister Margaret because she bequeathed directly to two of the children of Abigail.  The wording of the bequest, and the fact that she only bequeathed to the first 2 (Abigail and Jonathan) when 2 more had been born by then (Cornelius and Hannah) seems to be his logic although he never stated this.  On the first point, I disagree based on reviewing lots of wills of this era including bequests to children of dead siblings or to grandchildren of dead (testator's) children.  On the second point, I actually agree with him and this has made me lean more towards the possibility of a second, un-recorded wife despite all the missing burial and marriage records that this requires.

Re: Elizabeth, there is no proof of her last name at birth and, that I'm aware of, no primary records or peer-reviewed solid analysis (ie. "proof") that she was in any way related to his first wife.  Torrey said "maybe Welbourne" (he used a question mark) and I reviewed all his sources, none asserted a last name for her that I saw.  Importantly, he said "maybe Welbourne" on the record for her marriage to Bronson, but he asserted no name at all on her first marriage to David Carpenter.  So which Torrey entry is "better"?  At best it's a tie, and he only said "maybe Welbourne" anyway.  And as many folks like pointing out, Torrey is not a "source", he is an uncritical aggregator of sources of variable quality, so we always need to look behind the curtain at his citations.

The Wrotham parish registers do not give John Wyborne (father of Margaret and presumably "Abigail" her sister) a daughter Elizabeth.  Of course, they also don't give him a daughter Abigail so...once again lack of primary records.  However I agree with you that Elizabeth was not the mother of any of his children.

So this is the conundrum.  Nobody really knows "Abigail"'s first name as the Wyborne family seems to have left the parish of Wrotham before she was born, nobody really knows Elizabeth's last name at birth, and nobody really knows if there was an interim unrecorded wife.  We only have interpretation, marginal circumstantial evidence and unsupported guesses at this point.