Rebecca [surname unknown] Garfield

Biography

Life summary. Rebecca Garfield raised four children with Edward Garfield in the early decades of Watertown, Massachusetts. Their family grew through the 1630s and 1640s as the settlement developed around agriculture and grazing. She died in 1661, when her children ranged from adolescence to early adulthood.

Rebecca and Edward Garfield’s children grew up in a town still taking shape. Watertown had been settled only a few years before the birth of their son Joseph in September 1637. Their daughter Rebecca followed, and the family came to include Benjamin and Abigail. Over roughly a decade, their household expanded from the first of these recorded births to Abigail’s in June 1646. ^700-1700-2

Watertown lay beside the Charles River, west of Boston in present-day Massachusetts. Agriculture and grazing supported its dispersed households. Homes, cultivated plots and meadow did not necessarily lie together, so maintaining a family depended on resources and work extending beyond the house itself. This was the countryside in which Rebecca’s children grew up: a developing settlement whose households had to obtain food, fuel and useful goods while raising the next generation. ^700-3

The children were at different stages of life when Rebecca died. Joseph was twenty-three; Abigail had not yet reached fifteen. Benjamin, whose birth is placed around 1643, was near adulthood. Rebecca’s death on April 16, 1661 therefore came after years of raising the family, but while its younger members were still growing up. The town register described her as about fifty-five. ^700-1700-2

Edward survived her and remarried later that year. Rebecca’s children continued into households of their own, while their father’s later estate arrangements belonged to a changed family. Her years in Watertown had encompassed their childhoods and the beginnings of that transition. ^700-1700-2