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Isaac Allerton
Back to the Mayflower Passenger List
| Birth: About 1586.
Birthplace not yet known. |
 Mayflower
Families:
Isaac Allerton for Five Generations, contains the best,
most thorough and completely researched genealogy on Isaac Allerton.
It covers every descendant of Isaac Allerton for the first five generations,
to the birth of the sixth generation. This book is packed
full of pure genealogical research. Published by the General Society of
Mayflower Descendants.
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Marriages:
- Mary Norris, 4 November 1611, Leiden, Holland.
- Fear Brewster, c1626, Plymouth.
- Joanna Swinnerton, between 1634 and 1644, possibly at Marblehead.
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| Death:
Between 1 and 12 February 1658/9, New Haven. |
Children by Mary:
Bartholomew, Remember, Mary, an unnamed child buried in Leiden, Holland, and an
unnamed son stillborn in Plymouth Harbor.
Children by Fear: Sarah and Isaac. |
Biographical Summary
Isaac Allerton was about 34 years old
when he came to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620. He had
been a long-time member of the Pilgrims' church in Leiden, and was
recorded as having been a tailor from London. He married his first
wife, Marry Norris, in Leiden, in 1611, and there had children
Bartholomew, Remember and Mary, all of whom came on the Mayflower
with him. He and Mary buried a child, not yet named, at St. Peters
on 5 February 1620. Isaac Allerton had a sister Sarah in Leiden,
who married to Mayflower passenger Degory Priest.
Mayflower passenger John Allerton, also a Leiden resident, most
likely was a relative as well, although the exact relation has not been
discovered. Isaac Allerton was one of
the more active and prominent members of early Plymouth. He was
elected as Governor Bradford's assistant in 1621, and continued as an
assistant into the 1630s. In 1627, he was sent to negotiate the
Plymouth Colony's buyout of the Merchant Adventurers, the investors who
had originally funded (and had hoped to profit from) the Colony.
The Colony was about £2500 in debt; a small group of Plymouth's
residents, including Bradford, Brewster, Standish, Fuller, and Allerton,
sought to assume the debt themselves in return for the rights to profit
from the company. Allerton was sent to England to negotiate
further, and would return to England on several more occasions.
Unfortunately for the others, Allerton began to use his "free" trips to
England to engage in some private gains, purchasing goods and selling
them in the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. He also used his
capacity as Plymouth's designated negotiator to engage the Colony in a
number of unapproved money-making schemes: he went so far as to purchase
ships (which he partially used for his own private trading), and to
attempt to negotiate grants and patents for trade--all at great cost to
the company and none of it approved by the others back at Plymouth.
When his trading schemes failed, the Company found itself in far greater
debt than it ever started out with. When
Allerton's wife Fear died at Plymouth about 1634, and with the general
ire of the Colony against him, he had little reason to stay. He
moved to the New Haven Colony, and by 1644 had remarried to his third
wife, Joanna Swinnerton. Isaac Allerton remained an active trader,
and did regular business with the Dutch at New Netherland in modern-day
New York. Records of his trading can be found in numerous other
colonies as well, including Virginia and Barbados. |
Additional Resources
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Published Research
- Newman A. Hall, "The Children of Isaac Allerton," Mayflower
Quarterly 47(1981):14-18.
- Newman A. Hall, "The Unproved Allerton Family Lineage,"
Mayflower Quarterly 45:23-24.
- Newman A. Hall, "Allerton of Virginia," Virginia Genealogist
32:83-92.
- Newman A. Hall, "Joanna Swinnerton: The Third Wife of Isaac
Allerton, Sr.," New England Historic and Genealogical Register
124(1970):133.
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