52 Ancestors 2026: The Ancestor Who Stays With Me – Susannah Shattuck and Her Puritan Life

 

My family timeline is populated by many unforgettable ancestors, but I keep returning to my 8th- or 9th-great-grandmother, Susannah Shattuck. There are so many facets of her life that illuminate both New England history and my own family story.

Susannah was the daughter of William Shattuck, who emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s or early 1640s (some of the dates remain uncertain). William established himself in Watertown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, and over time the Shattuck family became part of the circle later known as the Boston Brahmins. Many of William’s descendants were physicians affiliated with Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. One of the family’s greatest contributions to public health, however, came not from a physician but from his 3rd-great-grandson, Lemuel Shattuck. A businessman, politician, historian, and researcher, Lemuel’s interest in accurate records and vital statistics led him to help found both the New England Historic Genealogical Society and the American Statistical Association. He also helped reshape the 1850 U.S. Census and authored a landmark sanitary survey of Massachusetts that contributed to major public health reforms.

For me, though, it is the life of my direct ancestor Susannah that remains most compelling. I have written about her before while exploring the biblical and virtue names favored by Puritan families, but there is much more to her story.

Susannah was the oldest child of William and his wife, also named Susanna, and was born around 1643. By the time she married in 1661, at about eighteen years of age, she had helped raise eight younger siblings—experience that would serve her well throughout her life. She married Joseph Morse, who lived on an adjacent property and was about six years older. They wasted little time starting a family, with their first child, Susanna, arriving about nine months after their marriage.

Their family grew steadily, with six children born at intervals of two or three years. Two things stand out. First, all of the children survived into the eighteenth century. Second, they bore the biblical names typical of the period: Susanna, Hester, Joseph, Samuel, Mary, and Hannah.

Joseph was not as fortunate. He died in 1677 at the age of forty, leaving thirty-four-year-old Susannah with children ranging in age from fifteen to three.

In an era when mortality was a fact of life and life insurance did not exist, widows and widowers often relied on family, community, and remarriage. Susannah was no exception. In 1678, just a year after Joseph’s death, she married John Fay, a widower five years her junior. John’s first wife, Mary Brigham, had died two years earlier at the age of twenty-seven, leaving three surviving children.

The oldest Morse daughters, Susanna and Hester, undoubtedly helped care for their younger siblings and step-siblings. Over the next eight years, Susannah and John expanded their household with four more children: sons David and Gershom, followed by daughters Ruth and Deliverance. Three more biblical names—and one virtue name.

When Deliverance was born, Susannah was about forty-three years old. The name may have reflected the Puritans’ sense of deliverance to a land where they could freely practice their faith—or perhaps Susannah’s own deliverance from childbearing.

Sadly, the couple’s happiness was short-lived. In 1690, only four years after Deliverance’s birth, John died at the age of forty-two. Once again, Susannah found herself responsible for a large and complicated household. Her unmarried daughters Mary and Hannah Morse, along with her stepdaughter Mary Fay, likely helped raise their younger siblings and half-siblings. It was truly a blended family.

For five years Susannah managed on her own, supported by family and community. Then, in 1695, she found companionship once more. Thomas Brigham, brother of John Fay’s first wife, had recently lost his own wife, Mary Rice, who died in May 1695 after bearing ten children, seven of whom survived. Thomas’s widowhood was brief; just two months later he married Susannah.

Once again, Susannah embraced the challenge of helping raise a large household of children. By this time, her youngest daughters, Ruth and Deliverance Fay, were old enough to assist. Susannah and Thomas had no children together, and eventually they experienced what might be called their empty-nest years.

Susannah died in 1717 at approximately seventy-four years of age. Thomas followed eight months later at age seventy-six. Together they had witnessed the transformation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from a struggling settlement into an established society.

Readers may notice that I describe Susannah as either my 8th- or 9th-great-grandmother. That uncertainty is not due to missing records but rather to pedigree convergence. The lines of two of her children eventually merged. A daughter from her first marriage, Hester Morse, is my 8th-great-grandmother, while a son from her second marriage, David Fay, is my 7th-great-grandfather.

Nor was this the family’s only convergence. The final blended household produced another connection when Mary Fay, Susannah’s stepdaughter, married her first cousin Jonathan Brigham. Meanwhile, Susannah’s daughter Deliverance Fay married her second cousin Jonathan Shattuck.

It appears that all of Susannah’s children survived into the eighteenth century. Given the relatively close spacing of the births, could these have been her only children? Did the family enjoy remarkable luck, exceptional health, or enough economic security to avoid some of the hardships faced by their neighbors? We cannot know for certain.

What I do know is that Susannah’s story stays with me. Learning about life helps transform the Puritans from historical caricatures—often portrayed as stern and joyless—into real people who loved, married, grieved, blended families, and persevered through life's many challenges. She almost sounds like one of us.

Picture: 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Puritan, 1899, Art Institute of Chicago

52 Ancestors 2026: Possibilities – So Many Research Choices!

 

My ancestors faced many choices throughout their lives: whether to stay put or migrate (most chose to migrate, obviously), whom to marry (usually someone from within their community), whether young men should go to war, and what occupation to pursue (anything other than “farmer” would have been a major departure). But this prompt makes me think less about their choices and more about the many possibilities and decisions I face in my own genealogical research.

When reading family narratives or watching shows like Finding Your Roots, I am often struck by the excitement people feel when they discover ancestors three or four generations back. My challenge is somewhat different. Many of my American lines extend 300 to 400 years into the past. In FamilySearch, I examined my calculated heritage eight generations back—roughly to the time of the founding of the United States—and found that about 82% of my ancestors were already living in what became the United States. As a result, I face an embarrassment of riches. (Math note: twelve generations back gives us 2¹², or 4,096 individuals—and all the people in between!)

The challenge, then, is deciding how to approach my research and which lines to pursue. A few years ago, I developed a plan: start with my paternal side, work through each great-grandparent line, confirm known lineages, focus on my brick walls, and then move “rightward” across my tree (or fan chart, depending on one's preference). That approach worked reasonably well until I encountered my first major brick wall. After spending too much time banging my head against it, I set my research aside for a while.

The decision to tackle brick walls one at a time proved to be a significant time sink. Last year, however, encouraged by the Generations Café site, I started my blog. The need to write stories forced me to look beyond my brick walls and search for interesting narratives elsewhere in my tree. In the process, I began making progress on several lines that had long resisted my research attempts.

By digging deeper, I was able to see migration patterns more clearly and learn more about my ancestors' families and communities. I explored records that I had previously overlooked, such as the agricultural census schedules, and gained a richer understanding of the times in which my ancestors lived.

New tools also opened up new possibilities. FamilySearch’s Full-Text Search allowed me to uncover records that had effectively been hidden for decades, providing new insights into people, places, and events. Artificial intelligence tools became an important part of my research and writing process as well. I used ChatGPT to help gather, organize, and evaluate disparate pieces of information, generating hypotheses and possible conclusions that I could then assess using my own experience and judgment. Trust, but verify.

With so much progress made in 2025, I expected 2026 to be a year focused primarily on confirmation and tree maintenance, and a blogging hiatus. Some of that has happened. I have added substantial documentation to FamilySearch and corrected numerous entries. Yet my locally maintained tree remains largely unchanged.

For that change of plans, I blame a flood of newly available land and probate records and the resulting expansion of several family lines. Much of my effort has gone into improving my portion of the collaborative FamilySearch tree, adding notes, sources, and explanations for future researchers. As a result, local tree cleanup and pension-file indexing are still waiting for me.

But sometimes opportunities are simply too tempting to ignore. My planned writing hiatus has yet to materialize. Instead, I continue to feel the urge to document new discoveries, liberally interpret each week’s prompts, and keep the momentum going.

52 Ancestors 2026: A Place that Matters – Bermuda

 

So many places and so little time! One unusual place has appeared in a branch of my family tree that I have only recently begun researching more deeply. That place is Bermuda. Why a tropical paradise and vacation destination extraordinaire? Well, it wasn’t by design.

Last year, I wrote that I was interested in researching the Cloud family line, and in the process I discovered a remarkable origin story that began in the earliest Quaker settlements of Pennsylvania. Unsurprisingly, these Quakers were dissenters who came to America to escape the reach of the British Crown and the Church of England. But they were not the only troublemakers in my family tree.

My 11th-great-grandfather, Stephen Hopkins, began life as an adventurer. Drawn to the Jamestown colony by the promise of land after a period of indentured service and the opportunity for a new beginning, he left his young wife and children in England and set sail for Virginia in 1609. He traveled aboard the Sea Venture, which carried the incoming governor and much-needed supplies for the struggling colony.

By circumstances that seem almost Shakespearean—think The Tempest—the ship was blown off course by a hurricane and wrecked on the shoals of Bermuda. The survivors faced a difficult choice: remain on the island and establish a new settlement, or salvage materials from the wreck and continue on to Jamestown.

Although the governor insisted that the voyage continue, Stephen argued that because they were no longer in Virginia, the terms of their indenture no longer applied. He became involved in a rebellion against the governor, was sentenced to death, and then successfully pleaded for mercy. In the end, he and the other survivors completed the journey to Jamestown.

Stephen remained in Virginia for several years before deciding he had had enough. He returned to England, where he found that his wife had died in 1613. Left to raise their children, he remarried around 1617/18 and started a second family.

One reason Jamestown may have lost its appeal was the colony’s leadership. Many of its English gentlemen were more interested in extracting wealth than in building a sustainable community. Early hopes of finding gold and silver came to nothing, and the colony struggled with starvation and poor planning. Wealth would eventually come through tobacco cultivation, while labor demands would tragically be met through the expansion of African slavery. Stephen, however, witnessed only the colony’s hardships and shortcomings.

He could have remained in England and lived a quieter life, but adventure called again. This time he joined a group of religious separatists who had fled to the Netherlands and planned to establish a colony farther north. These settlers were, of course, the Pilgrims.

Their ship, the Mayflower, also sailed off course, eventually landing at Cape Cod rather than their intended destination. Stephen’s previous colonial experience proved invaluable. He participated in the exploration parties that searched for a suitable settlement location, eventually helping to select Plymouth.

Before landing, the settlers drafted the Mayflower Compact, establishing a more egalitarian system of self-government in which each male settler had a voice. The Compact differed significantly from the structure of the Virginia colony and reflected the values of a community determined to govern itself. Combined with the Pilgrims’ strong work ethic and religious convictions, it helped the colony survive its difficult early years—even if Massachusetts was no Bermuda.

We cannot know how much Stephen’s experiences in Bermuda and Jamestown influenced the creation of the Compact, but he was one of its signers. His prior experience also helped foster good relations and trade with Indigenous peoples, relationships that were crucial to Plymouth’s survival.

Stephen prospered in Plymouth as a tavern keeper, though he occasionally found himself in trouble because his establishment attracted rowdy patrons and because he was somewhat more tolerant of such behavior than religious authorities preferred.

So Bermuda appears to have been the place where Stephen’s independent streak first became evident. Yet I cannot help but think that his brand of troublemaking—questioning authority, challenging established hierarchies, and insisting on fair treatment—was part of a larger spirit that contributed to America’s longstanding discomfort with rigid class systems and helped lay the groundwork for the rebellion that would come more than a century after his death in 1644.

Pictures: 

"Stephen Hopkins, his wife and daughters, Damaris and Constance, with their son Oceanus" By Edward P. McLaughlin - https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/70795q878, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=173082245

Mayflower Compact: Transcription by William Bradford (1590-1657) - Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=847329