Women In My Family History: Part 16

Margaret Lewen Lamberton Goodyear

1613 - 1655

(further information and photo credit for above painting can be found HERE)

Margaret Lewen was born in London England in 1613.   In 1629 she married George Lamberton.   The couple immigrated to America and had seven children.  George was a sea captain.  I honor Margaret in this blog post because for her to have been living in New Haven Connecticut in the first half of the 1600's with seven children and having her husband away at sea for his job must have required a lot of courage.  But tragedy struck in 1646 when George started out in his ship , The Great Shippe, with 70 passengers and cargo for England.  The ship never reached it's destination and was lost at sea.  One of the women passengers was the wife of Stephen Goodyear and  Margaret Lamberton eventually married Stephen and had three more children.   I admire Margaret for not only her courage but her ability to survive and provide for herself and her children.  One of Margaret's daughters by George Lumberton was named Mercy and she married Shubael Painter.   They named their daughter Margaret who married Captain Richard Morris.  Margaret and Richard had among their children a son named Richard Jr who had a son named David.   David Morris  and his wife Hannah had nine children and two of them have lines that go down in my tree.  Their son Charles had a daughter named Maria who married Cornelius Sullivan.  They had a daughter named Amelia Jane who married Samuel Patton.  Samuel and Amelia had a daughter named Clara who married LeRoy Shepler.  And they had a daughter named Georgia who married William Harvey Rairigh and their son was my mother's father.  Back tracking to David Morris and his wife Hannah who had the son named Charles,  there was another brother named David Hamilton Morris who had eleven children including a daughter named Martha Jane.    Martha Morris married Francis H Sullivan and  among their eight children was a daughter named Aimme who gave birth to an illegitimate daughter named Leona.  Leona married Oscar Rohrer and died shortly after giving birth to a son Fred.  Fred Rohrer was my father's father.  Another interesting fact about the story of Margaret Lewen is that 200 years after her husband was lost at sea,  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about  the incident.  It is called The Phantom Ship.  Please enjoy the video of the poem that follows.