Mary (Hyanno) Cummaquid (abt. 1620 - abt. 1660)

Born about 1620 in Barnstable, Barnstable, Massachusetts

Died about 1660 at about age 40 in Barnstable, Barnstable, Massachusetts

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Mary (Hyanno) Cummaquid is currently protected by the Native Americans Project for reasons described below. Join: Native Americans Project Discuss: native_americans

NOTE: When a dispute exists concerning the identity of a given person-- in this case, a spouse-- it is the policy of WikiTree's Puritan Great Migration project to use the surname "Unknown," to detach disputed relations from the profile page in question (this one and associated children), and to link to the disputed profile pages from within the relevant narrative. That has been done in the case of the spouse of Augustine/Austin Bearce. The disputed claim that his wife was a Native American is discussed below; please do not attach Mary "Little Dove" Hyanno as spouse of Augustine or as mother to his children. In addition, while there is contemporaneous documentary evidence of the existence of Chief John Hyanno and his father Great Chief Iyannough, there is no such evidence of a daughter -- much less a daughter that married an English settler. Therefore, we have detached "Little Dove" from any parents. Thank you.

Origins of the Tradition

The Bearse/Hyanno marriage entered the written record 300 years after the fact via a document filed in the 1930s by Franklyn Ele-watum Bearce, who claimed to be a Scaticoke and Eastern Indian, but was never accepted as such by the tribe or the government, in an attempt to obtain benefits as an Indian from the State of Connecticut.^[1]

Franklyn Bearce's manuscript claimed that Little Dove was supposedly of Mattachee Village, near Barnstable, Massachusetts, daughter of Chief John Hyanno (son of Iyannough, the sachem of the Mattachee village of Wampanoags of Cape Cod, and Princess Canonicus. (Others, without sources, claim they were of the Cummaquid tribe.) John Hyanno died after 1680 on Cape Cod.

Others, more recently, have, without source, suggested she was daughter of Iyannough Cummaquid (d. 1624) and Mary (Nopee) No-pee. While Iyannough is documented as having existed, no such documentation exists for this wife.

Still others claim (without documentation) a line of descent from a Chief Tashtassuck, who was born before 1520.

Mr. Bearce's claims were disputed in a article by Donald Lines Jacobus entitled, "Austin Bearse and His Alleged Indian Connections" in The American Genealogist, published 1938.^[2] See this point-by-point analysis of the dispute. See also Lee Murrah's rebuttal to Jacobus, and a counter-rebuttal.

Despite this analysis, family traditions of the Hyanno marriage persist to this day; some claim these traditions do not appear to have been derived from Franklyn Bearce, but no one has produced any documentation that's older than Bearce's "genealogy".

A History of The Episcopal Church In Narragansett Rhode Island] by Wilkins Updike Boston, published in 1847, made no mention of the Bearse/Hyanno connection. However, they claim a 1907 reprint of this book (pp 252-3), in 1907 (printed & published by D.B. Updike, The Merrymount Press, 1907), fully details the ancestry of Mary Hyanno and her children with Austin Bearse. Those family genealogists are, in fact, quite mistaken. Someone included a descendants tree, along with quotes from said book, and posted them on line. Others have then been sharing this misinformation, all over (Ancestry, Genealogy.com, FamilySearch, ...).^[3]

Quotes taken from that book end here ... "For his conscience sake (many differences arising) he left Taunton and came to the Nahiggonsik Countrey where by God’s mercy and the fav of ye Nahiggonsik Sachems he broke the Ice (at his great Charge and Hazards)" ... just before the descendants tree. There is no Augustine/Mary Hyanno marriage mentioned in this book, anywhere. In fact, there is not a single Bearse, Bearce, or Bearss, in this entire book. There is also not a single Hyanno, Yanno, Iyannough, or Cummaquid, in this entire book."^[4]

Cornwell Connections

The identity of William Cornwell's second wife as “Mary Hyanno,” a supposed Indian princess was started in the late 1990s, by United Ancestries, a now-defunct company, with the publication of a CD-Rom of its compiled genealogical information, Family Archive CD-100: 1500-1990 Family Pedigrees. This identity is totally unsupported by any original sources despite diligent research by qualified genealogists. See The Middler, Newsletter of the Society of Middletown First Settlers Descendants, Vol 6 No.1, Spring 2006 by Editor R. W Bacon for an in depth discussion of this topic.

Sources

1. ↑ Swimming Eel - Franklyn Ele-wa-tum BeArce, "From out of the Past, Who Our Forefathers Really Were: Our White and Indian Ancestors back to 1628, (Library of Congress Manuscript). Available online here, here and here
2. ↑ Donald Lines Jacobus, "Austin Bearse and his Alleged Indian Connections," in The American Genealogist, 15 (1938-39):113-118
3. ↑ In reply to: Re: Austin Bearse family [1]
4. ↑ A history of the Episcopal church in Narragansett, Rhode Island, by Updike, Wilkins [2]

See also:

• The Legends of Augustine and Mary Bearse
• Lee Murrah rebuttal with a counter-rebuttal
• Clarence Almon Torrey, New England Marriages Prior To 1700 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Company, Inc., 1985)
• Eyewitness History: The Price of Adultery in Puritan Massachusetts, 1641
• The Plymouth Colony Archive Project: Sexual Misconduct in Plymouth Colony