Family history beyond the Leiden deeds
A butcher’s sons, and an orphan absorbed by family
Samuel Fuller is generally identified as the son of Robert Fuller, a butcher, baptised at Redenhall in Norfolk on 20 January 1580/1. His brother Edward, also a Mayflower passenger, was baptised in the same parish on 4 September 1575, and their mother Sarah Dunthorne was buried there on 1 July 1584. [American Ancestors]
The identification rests on circumstantial evidence: recurring family names, and Thomas Morton’s remark in 1637 that Samuel Fuller was a butcher’s son. Robert Charles Anderson’s sketch states plainly that the evidence connecting the two brothers to Robert Fuller of Redenhall is weaker than one would wish. [American Ancestors]
Two details are often given wrongly. Fuller’s first wife, named in the 1613 Leiden marriage record, was Alice — sometimes Elsie — Glascock, who had died by then; nothing else about her is known. Agnes Carpenter, his second wife, was baptised at Wrington in Somerset on 16 December 1593 and buried at Leiden on 3 July 1615, so that marriage lasted barely two years. Fuller’s own will is dated 9 August 1633, with probate on 26 September; the date of 30 July found in some accounts is incorrect. [mayflowerhistory.com]
Edward Fuller and his wife both died during the first winter at Plymouth. Their son Samuel, about twelve years old, survived, and appears in the 1627 division of cattle within his uncle’s household — a rare documentary trace of an orphaned child absorbed by relatives in the new colony. [Records of the Colony of New Plymouth]
