Week 15 - Brick Wall - Deborah (plus Week 14 - Great)

 

Week 15: Brick Wall - Deborah   (plus Week 14: Great)

This is the story of my 6^th great grandparents by the names of Thomas Crowell and his wife, Deborah____, and their possible connection to the Great Sachem Massasoit.

The first five-six generations of Pilgrim descendants in Plymouth Colony after arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 have been extensively researched and well documented by both professional and amateur genealogists. My 6th great grandmother Deborah____  has been the subject of much discussion and it seems no stone has been left unturned. Still, there is no definitive answer as to her last name or ancestry.

Thomas is a first generation descendant of Yelverton Crowe (later Crowell) who arrived in Boston with his wife and parents from England in 1635. Thomas was born in Yarmouth, Barnstable County in 1645. He married Deborah in 1684 in Yarmouth and they went on to have ten children between the years 1685 and 1700. I, too, have been unable to find any maiden name or former married name for Deborah but did find a story about her possibly being a granddaughter of the Great Chief Massasoit, leader of the Pokanoket/Wampanoag confederation of Native American tribes (in present day Rhode Island and Massachusetts).

The story is that Deborah was the daughter of Massasoit’s oldest son Wamsutta (1621-1662), also known by his English given name of Alexander. The overarching difficulty is proving the Deborah-Wamsutta-Massasoit connection. I find myself wanting to believe the story. However, early village records were lost in a fire at the home of the town clerk of Yarmouth and with missing records, how does one prove the ethnicity of a person who lived more than 300 years ago? The Pokanoket had no written language and depended upon oral tradition for their history. My conclusion, together with others working on this same Deborah mystery, is that there is no written proof of Deborah being a daughter of Wamsutta or a granddaughter of Massasoit. In fact there is no proof of her ethnicity at all. DNA could be useful but not when faced with a 300+ year time gap. Consequently, I have marked Deborah in my tree with what most likely will be a permanent “Brick Wall”.

 

The man I’d like to prove I am related to:

Great Sachem (Chief) Massasoit

Massasoit’s birth has been estimated to have been 1580. He was born in a Pokanoket village near what today is Bristol, Rhode Island, just west of the present day south eastern Massachusetts-Rhode Island state line. Not much is known about Massasoit prior to the Pilgrims arrival in Plymouth Harbor in December 1620.

However, after their arrival, Massasoit played a key role in the success of the colonists. He sent an emissary by the name of Samoset to make first contact with the Pilgrims. Samoset startled the colonists on March 16, 1621 by walking into Plymouth Village and greeting them in English, saying “Welcome”, and asking for a beer. He told the colonists that the place where they now lived was called Patuxet, and that about four years ago all the inhabitants died of an extraordinary plague and that there was no one left to hinder their possession, or lay claim to it.

First Contact

Samoset

Samoset was an Abernaki sagamore (subordinate chief) of a small tribe in what today is eastern Maine where he learned a little English from English fishermen who had established a fishing camp on the Maine coast several years before. Samoset stayed with the colonists for a few days then came back on March 22, 1621, with Squanto, the last remaining member of the Patuxet tribe. Squanto spoke much better English than Samoset and had arranged for a meeting between Massasoit and the Pilgrims.

Massasoit also arrived at Plymouth on March 22, 1621. He was interested in allying himself and his Pokanoket/Wampanoag tribal confederation with the English settlers against his powerful enemies, the Narragansett tribe located to the west in present day Rhode Island and Connecticut. Plymouth's Governor, John Carver, was also very interested in signing a peace treaty. After all, the Pilgrims needed all the help they could get that first winter.

The treaty was signed that day and said in part, “that none of Massasoit’s men would harm the Pilgrims---and if they did, he would send them to the Pilgrims for punishment. And if anyone did unjust war against Massasoit, the Pilgrims would come to his aid.”

To make a long story short, Massasoit kept his promise to the day he died in 1661. Although there were tensions with other Indians elsewhere, e.g., the Pequot tribe in Connecticut in 1635-36, Massasoit not only helped the Plymouth Colonists survive during the first winter of 1620-21 but he also provided them with forty years of relative peace during which time they grew in numbers and prospered.