1641.
Rev. Richard Blinman?
[GENEALOGIES AND THEIR MORAL.]
We were carelessly looking over a genealogy of the "Minot Family" in the second number of the "New England Historical and Genealogical Register," when suddenly our eyes were suffused with tears, as they rested on the following sentence in the catalogue of the children of Capt. John Minot, who died in Dorchester, 1669:
"Martha, born Sept. 22, 1657; died, single, Nov. 23, 1678, aged 21. She was engaged to be married, but died unmarried, leaving a will in which she directed that at her funeral her betrothed husband, 'John Morgan, Jr. be all over mourning, and follow next after me.'"
What a history is there in these few words about Martha Minot, who lived almost two centuries ago! The mind runs back in a moment to those times, when almost all New England was a wilderness—to those days of the old Indian wars, when no man could be a "captain" without being a man of some rank and consequence. Just after the close of King Philip's war, when the villages of New England were all in peace, Capt. John Minot's daughter Martha, twenty-one years of age, and having come into possession of her share of her father's estate, had plighted her troth to one she loved, and was expecting to be married too, when disease fastened upon her young frame, and would not be repelled. In the chill November air, when
"The melancholy days were come, the saddest of the year,"
she faded like a leaf. And at her burial there followed, nearer than brother or sister, nearest to the hearse, the one whom, of all the living, she loved most, from whom to part had been to her more painful than the death-pang, and who had been in her thoughts till "the love-light in her eye" was extinguished. That single item in her directions for her funeral, that "John Morgan, Jr., be all over mourning, and follow next after me," tells the whole story.