Mercy Tuttle

1650 - Aft 1695  (> 46 years)

• Name	Mercy Tuttle  [1]
  Birth	27 Apr 1650	New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut   [2, 3]
  Baptism	19 May 1650	New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut   [2, 3]
  Gender	Female
  Death	Aft 1695  [3]
  Person ID	I23372	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	14 Feb 2024

  
  

  Father	William Tuttle,   b. Bef 26 Dec 1607   d. Between 10 Mar 1673 and 27 Apr 1673, New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut (Age > 65 years)
  Mother	Elizabeth,   b. Abt 1609   d. 30 Dec 1684, New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut (Age ~ 75 years)
  Marriage	Bef 1631  [2, 4]
  Family ID	F9371	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Samuel Brown,   b. Bef 7 Aug 1645   d. 4 Nov 1691, Wallingford, New Haven, Connecticut (Age > 46 years)
  Marriage	2 May 1667	New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut   [2, 3]
  Children	+ 1. Rachel Brown,   b. 14 Apr 1677, New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut d. 24 Jan 1718, Wallingford, New Haven, Connecticut (Age 40 years)
  Family ID	F14049	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	14 Feb 2024

  
  

• Notes

  From Divorce, Murder and Madness: The Puritan Tuttles of the New Haven Colony: Mercy Tuttle, the youngest daughter of the clan, had married Samuel Brown in 1667 at age 17. The couple had several children, including a son, Samuel. They lived in Wallingford. It would come out later that Mercy Tuttle was erratic in her behavior throughout life. (Her older brother, David, had also been judged insane years earlier.) When Mercy’s husband died in 1691, there was no longer anyone to act as a check on her. On the night of June 23, she attacked her son Samuel with an ax and killed him. Mercy admitted she had killed her son, but said it was not done out of malice. Instead, she said, the murder was committed “at the instigation of the devil.” In October 1691, the court convicted Mercy of murder, but withheld sentence until 1693. Then it ruled: “Having weighed the evidences given in, to prove that she hath generally been in a crazed or distracted condition as well long before she committed the act, as at that time, and having observed since that she is in such a condition, do not see cause to pass sentence of death against her, but for preventing her doing the like or other mischief for the future, do order, that she shall be kept in custody of the magistrates of New Haven.” And that’s where she died, in the custody of the magistrates of the New Haven Colony her father had hoped to build.

  
  

• Sources

  [S185] Families of Ancient New Haven, originally published as New Haven Genealogical Magazine, vols. I-VIII, compiled by Donald Lines Jacobus. Rome, New York: Clarence D. Smith, 1923-1932. [S101] The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, Volumes 1-3 and The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volumes 1-7, by Robert Charles Anderson. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1996-2011. [S7416] Frederick C. Hart, Jr., "Ancestry of William Weed of Stamford and Darien, Connecticut." Connecticut Ancestry 50:101; 50:145; 51:1, 2008. [S388] FamousKin.com.