John Carver
BAPTISM: 12 March 1580/1 at Great Bealings, Suffolk, England, son of John and Margaret Carver.
FIRST MARRIAGE: About 1602, Martha Rose, daughter of William Rose of Tuddenham, Suffolk, England.
SECOND MARRIAGE: Katherine (White) Legatt, before 23 May 1615, at Leiden, Holland, daughter of Alexander White.
CHILDREN BY FIRST WIFE: Margaret
CHILDREN BY SECOND WIFE: (Possibly) unnamed child buried 1617 at Leiden.
DEATH: April 1621 at Plymouth, apparently of heat-stroke.
In September 2019, Sue Allan, myself, and Simon Neal, announced the discovery of the probable English origin of John Carver at the Mayflower Genealogy conference of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society. These discoveries were subsequently published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 174(2020):5-20.
John Carver was baptized 12 March 1580/1 at Great Bealings, Suffolk, England, the son of John and Margaret Carver. About 1602, he married Martha (sometimes Mallye) Rose, daughter of William Rose of neighboring Tuddenham, Suffolk. Their first and only child, Margaret, was baptized at Great Bealings on 26 April 1603. Carver’s father died when he was nine years old, and his mother remarried to Lancelot Dunning. When he turned 21, he claimed his father’s land inheritance in Seckford Hall Manor at Great Bealings. John Carver was active within the manorial court acting as juror on several occasions between 1602 and 1606, but sold off all his properties in 1608 to Roger Fynch and disappeared from Suffolk. He next appears in 1615 in Leiden, Holland.
Carver married, before May 1615, to Katherine (White) Legatt, the daughter of Alexander White of Sturton-le-Steeple, Nottinghamshire. Katherine's sister Bridget White married the Pilgrims' pastor John Robinson.
When the Pilgrims made the decision to begin moving their church to somewhere in America, they sent John Carver and Robert Cushman as their representatives to England to negotiate with the Virginia Company and organize the business. Carver came on the Mayflower, where he acted as governor on the ship for the voyage. After arrival, he was elected governor of the Colony, and remained in that capacity until his untimely death from an apparent heat-stroke in April 1621. His wife Katherine died a few weeks later, supposedly of a "broken heart."
