On this day 332 years ago (21 July 1692) my nine-times-great-grandmother, Ann Elizabeth Fuller, died, probably in Massachusetts. She was born around 1634-1635, either in London or in Charlestown, Massachusetts, though London seems more plausible. Her Find a Grave memorial indicates she was baptized at St. Mary Whitechapel in London, though I will need to dig in further to find the primary sources that back up this information. Interestingly, the lime whitewash on this chapel in its early days was what supposedly gave this area of London its “Whitechapel” moniker, most famously associated, of course with Jack the Ripper.1
Sometime before 1655 Ann married Benjamin Willson, and they had seven children, all born in Suffolk County, Massachusetts. Their youngest child, Jerimiah, was my eight-times-great-grandfather. When Jerimiah was less than two years old, his father sailed back to London to settle his mother’s estate but died at sea. This left Ann a widow at 29 with 7 children to raise. An inventory of Benjamin’s property at the time of his death is extant and gives an interesting glimpse into the everyday items our ancestors owned and used (though reading it will test one’s palaeography skills).
On 3 April 1671, Ann married again, this time to George Conaway. Her death record indicates he died before her. She was only 53 at her own death and is buried in the Phipps Street Burying Ground in Charlestown. Her tombstone (still remarkably legible) notes her age at her death as 48. This is fairly clearly incorrect, as this would make her birth year around 1644, and her daughter Anna Willson was born in 1655. Ah, the pitfalls of genealogy when even “written in stone” doesn’t count for much…
