Monday Is for Mothers: Overview

The first Monday post I dedicated to my female ancestors featured a portrait of my great great great grandmother Elizabeth Taylor Tomlinson who died about 1863. Since then I've written 82 posts on the topic including ones about my two mothers--birth mother Alta Mae Slater and Bernice Evangeline Grenfell Currey, the mother who raised me. I have looked more closely into the lives of my paternal grandmother Letta Estella Porter Warren Williams Turnbull,* and all of my great and great great grandmothers. Only one of my third-great grandmothers (Maria Evans Biddle) remains undone and, looking over the list, it appears the time has come to address the lives of my fourth-great grandmothers, since I've only written about seven of them out of a potential 32 women. Farther back in time than that it's more difficult to find enough information to write about some of my grandmothers but I have written about some including a paternal ninth-great grandmother Catherine Gookin Warren who died in Kent, England, in 1640.

[Elizabeth Taylor Tomlinson, courtesy of Olive Slater-Kennedy]

*We're hoping to hear more about her life from my first cousin who knew her.


© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Monday is for Mothers: Katherine Gookin

If we have it right, Katherine Gookin is my 9th great grandmother and the mother of the Thomas Warren who settled in Virginia in the early 1640s. She was baptized in Kent, England, in October of 1599 and is believed to be the daughter of Thomas Gookin and his wife Jane Thurston.

According to a transcription in the notes made by Frank Watt Tyler, Katherine married William Warren on 1 June 1619 in Ripple, Kent. Both of them came from established landholding families in the county.

Ancestry.com. Kent, England, Tyler Index to Parish Registers, 1538-1874 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. This collection was indexed by Ancestry World Archives Project contributors.

Original data: Frank Watt Tyler. The Tyler Collection. Canterbury, Kent, England: The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies.

The couple had four children that we know of, three sons (Thomas being the youngest of them) and a daughter. Their oldest boy died when still an infant.

After William died in 1631, Katherine married again and died in Kent in 1640.

Katherine was a niece of Daniel Gookin and cousin to his son Daniel, both of whom were actively promoting settlement in Virginia at the time. When the teenaged Thomas Warren arrived there in the early 1640s, Daniel Gookin the younger claimed the headright for him.

Since Thomas quickly became a landowner and respected member of the community it's clear that he didn't arrive in the colony as an indentured servant. The money and status the son and heir of William Warren of Ripple, Kent, had could explain how that happened and there are no further records for Thomas Warren in England after the time of Thomas's arrival in Virginia.

© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.