Others assign to her a more exotic -- yet still Anglicized -- Native American name such as Little Dove. Was she an English Mary scrabbling to survive in an unfamiliar New World? Or was she a sachem’s daughter married off to an unknown English man as part of a 17th century diplomatic effort?
The truth lies somewhere in between the English Madonna and the Wampanoag princess. None of us will ever know with certainty because her life, like thousands of other women in colonial New England, was not recorded with the same care and consideration as the men around her. As a result, what is known about her can only understood through the activities of the man she married and the children she bore.
The records show that she married, gave birth to eleven children, buried four of them before their fifth birthdays, and then died. No letters written in her hand have ever been uncovered. In all likelihood, this is because she was not literate. Her apparent illiteracy, coupled with the absence of recording technology we enjoy so much today, has made her voiceless as well as nameless.
In declaration of a Sisyphean task, I will begin to draw the known events of her life out of the silent shadows. She will have a voice and a name. She is, after all, my grandmother. Mary. Little Dove. Grandmother. In the search to know her name and hear her voice, I hope to reclaim the eleven generations between us, our tenuous link in time matching the number of children she bore.
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