Elizabeth Brewster

Biography

Elizabeth Brewster was born in 1637, a daughter of Jonathan Brewster and Lucretia Oldham. In New London, a port on Connecticut’s southeastern coast, she married Peter Bradley, a mariner whose home lot lay near the waterfront. Their children were Elizabeth, Hannah, Peter and Lucretia. Peter’s death at Flushing on Long Island, now part of Queens in New York City, in 1662 left her a widow with a young family.

Her later relationship with the merchant Christopher Christophers brought her before the county court. He was still married to Mary Berry when Elizabeth bore him children. Modern research identifies their son John’s birth in September 1668 and another child born during 1673–74. The surviving proceedings place Elizabeth’s private life under public legal scrutiny; they do not disclose her own account of the relationship.

Mary Berry died in July 1676, and Elizabeth and Christopher were married by June 1677. The two households became closely intertwined. Elizabeth’s son Peter married Christopher’s daughter Mary, and her daughter Lucretia married his son Richard. These marriages connected children of their respective earlier unions.

Christopher died in 1687, leaving Elizabeth widowed again. Her burial was recorded in New London’s Old Burying Ground under the name Elizabeth Christophers. By the time an inscription was copied in the nineteenth century, part of the stone was broken away. It preserved her married identity and an age of about seventy, while the damaged date left later researchers to reconstruct the end of her life at about 1708.