Person:Experience Hollard (1)

The Identity of the First Wife of Timothy Thornton [Experience Hollard?]

"The query in the Register of April, 1854, asking the relationship to John Brooking of the overseers nominated in his will Oct. 27, 1682, his "loving brother Timothy Thornton and cousin John Ballantine," may now be answered. Mr. Thornton married his wife's sister, and Col. Ballantine was his wife's sister's son. The latter relation is established beyond cavil; the former perhaps is not. …

After [John Brooking's] death, Timothy Thornton, named as overseer in his will, assisted in settling his affairs …

Suffolk Deeds disclose that in 1682 Timothy Thornton had gone security for John Brooking's indebtedness of £50 to Mrs. Mary Anderson and £20 to George Hollard. …

Timothy Thornton was born in 1647 (by his gravestone), and his father, an ejected minister, Rev. Thomas Thornton, came out of [back from] England after 1662, according the Mather's Magnalia, and was the pastor at Yarmouth. There is nothing to prove that Timothy ever lived at Yarmouth. He was at least 15 years old when he came over [back], and is first heard of as a shipwright in Merry's shipyard at the North End. Walter Merry had died and his widow had married Robert Thornton who may have been a relative. We have it then that this young Englishman, about 25 years old, about 10 years [back] in this country, and now alone in Boston, married either a sister of John Brooking, adult in 1658, a mariner (sometime maltster), who had no known relatives here and may have been merely one of the many seafaring men who elected to remain here, or else that he married the young daughter who came out of England with the widow, bred there … if she were born in Boston, unable to remember it, and coming to accompany her mother and join her elder sisters … in Boston. A bit of evidence is that a bond running to Timothy Thornton, in the year 1680, was witnessed by William and Hannah Long.

Catherine Hollard was 23 [22 per Hotten] in 1635, and might have borne several children after returning to England. Timothy Thornton's children were born 1674 to 1690. His wife's name appears always as Experience, except once in the record of birth of Catherine, as daughter of Timothy and Mary Thornton, born Apr. 16, 1683. Both before and after that date, viz. 1679-80 and Dec. 24, 1683, she signed deeds as Experience. Of course the town clerk may have made a blunder, or may it be that by a bit of sentiment, although calling herself experience, she chose in this instance, naming a child for her mother, to record her own name as her mother named her? Mary Hollard was by about four years Timothy Thornton's junior. A younger daughter, born in England, might have been nineteen when her first child was born."^[3]

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 Thomas Thornton, in Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995)
   III:1815.

   Experience Hollard, daughter of Angel Hollard [NEHGR 63:381-383].

2. ↑ Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States. Births, Baptisms, Marriages, and Deaths, 1630-1699 (A Report of the Record Commissioners): Document 130. (Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States: Rockwell and Churchill, City Printers, 1883)
   219.

   1694 Wife of Timothy Thornton died March 23 [1693/94 inferred from placement in list].

3. ↑ Libby, Charles Thornton. Brooking, Thornton, Ballantine, Hollard. New England Historical and Genealogical Register. (New England Historic Genealogical Society, Oct 1909)
   63:381-383.
4. ↑ In the Thomas Thornton sketch The Great Migration Begins III:1815, Anderson says that son Timothy married Experience daughter of Angel Hollard. In the Angel Hollard sketch The Great Migration III:379, he does not list Experience as one of the daughters of Angel and Katherine (Richards) Hollard.