Mrs. Martha Harding

Bef 1612 - 1633  (> 21 years)

• Name	Martha Harding  [1]
  Prefix	Mrs.
  Birth	Bef 1612  [2]
  Gender	Female
  Death	Between 25 Mar 1633 and 28 Oct 1633	Plymouth, Plymouth, Massachusetts   [2]
  Person ID	I19949	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	3 Nov 2021

  
  

  Family
  Children	+ 1. Joseph Harding,   b. Bef 1632, of Eastham, Barnstable, Massachusetts d. 1685, Eastham, Barnstable, Massachusetts (Age > 53 years)
  Family ID	F12195	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	16 Dec 2018

  
  

• Notes

  She arrived in about 1632 and lived the rest of her life at Plymouth. As "Widow Harding" she was assessed 9s. in the Plymouth tax list of 25 Mar 1633. The identity of her Harding husband is unknown and it is presumed that he died in England before she and her son Joseph (her only child) sailed for New England. The story, put forth in Wilbur Judd Harding's 1925 The Hardings in America, that he was a Joseph Harding "of Braintree" (which began in 1635, well after her and her husband's death), that he was "a mariner, engaged in fishing," that he and Martha married in 1624 while she was living in Plymouth (there is no indication of her at Plymouth before the early 1630s), and that he was "a member of the Gov. Gorges party", is entirely fanciful; no evidence exists for a single bit of it. She may have been a sister of John Doane, who was ward to her son Joseph Harding after her death.

  
  

• Sources

  [S2603] John Insley Coddington, "The Widow Mary Ring, of Plymouth, Mass., and Her Children." The American Genealogist 42:193, Oct 1966. [S1647] The Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony 1620-1633, by Robert Charles Anderson. Boston: New York Historic Genealogical Society, 2004.