Biographical Information
Richard Warren's English origins and ancestry have been the subject
of much speculation, and countless different ancestries have been
published for him, without a shred of evidence to support them.
Luckily in December 2002, Edward Davies discovered the missing piece of
the puzzle. Researchers had long known of the marriage of Richard
Warren to Elizabeth Walker on 14 April 1610 at Great Amwell, Hertford.
Since we know the Mayflower passenger had a wife named Elizabeth,
and a first child born about 1610, this was a promising record.
But no children were found for this couple in the parish registers, and
no further evidence beyond the names and timing, until the will of
Augustine Walker was discovered.
In the will of Augustine Walker, dated April 1613, he mentions "my
daughter Elizabeth Warren wife of Richard Warren", and "her three
children Mary, Ann and Sarah." We know that the Mayflower
passenger's first three children were named Mary, Ann, and Sarah (in
that birth order). Very little is
known about Richard Warren's life in America. He came alone on the
Mayflower in 1620, leaving behind his wife and five daughters.
They came to him on the ship Anne in 1623, and Richard and
Elizabeth subsequently had sons Nathaniel and Joseph at Plymouth. He received his
acres in the Division of Land in 1623, and his family shared in the 1627
Division of Cattle. But he died a year later in 1628, the only
record of his death being found in Nathaniel Morton's 1669 book New
England's Memorial, in which he writes: "This year [1628] died Mr.
Richard Warren, who was an useful instrument and during his life bare a
deep share in the difficulties and troubles of the first settlement of
the Plantation of New Plymouth." All of Richard Warren's children
survived to adulthood, married, and had large families: making Richard
Warren one of the most common Mayflower passengers to be
descended from. Richard Warren's descendants include such notables
as Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant, President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
and Alan B. Shepard, Jr. the first American in space and the fifth
person to walk on the moon.
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