Erin Taylor is the descendant of English, Irish, Cherokee, Cajun, land-owning, land-thieving, courageous, questionable, homesteading and homicidal American settlers. She is the mother to five children, author of two books, and works professionally as a disability advocate in Oklahoma. Erin’s daughter, Gwyn, designed the blog’s banner using original artwork.
Alice Martin Bishop is her 10x great grandmother and blog co-author Kristin Luce is her distant yet, close to Erin’s heart, Martin cousin. Other writings and image work by Erin Taylor can be found at ETCofErin.com (2015).
Kristin Luce was happily researching her 19th-century Pennsylvania Luces when Erin Taylor wheedled her into this blog, but she is enjoying getting to know her Plymouth Colony ancestors, and trying not to confuse the Pilgrims and the Puritans.
A freelance editor, Kristin is the mother of two daughters and lives on the California coast. She is grateful to Erin for encouraging her to start writing again.
In the future, we will consider guest submissions to this post. Appropriate use of primary and secondary source material, topical relevance, and editing on our part are all part of the process of being a guest blogger.
Please check out Dennis Sutton’s website. njsuttonfamily.org
Harry Sutton
Wolfeboro,NH
Hello! Alice is also my 10x. great grandmother.
Welcome Cortnie! We have a bunch of posts in the pipeline so you’ve found us at a good time.
I was recently researching my ancestry and discovered Bishop was also my 10x grandmother[demitrius/William sutton] I’m curious about your link to alice. please respond.
Hi Earl — which link are you talking about? If it is the link of Killer Kin’s Facebook page, it should go back to this blog which I write with Kristin Luce.
I’m greatly enjoying your site. I am 12 generations descended from Richard Bishop and Alice Martin. James Bishop’s daughter Elizabeth married John Bonney. Six generations of Bonney’s later, Abigail Bonney married Adoniram Robinson, who is my great, great, great grandfather. Extended families of Bonneys and Robinsons settled in the Hartford-Sumner, Maine area. I grew up in nearby Norway, Maine and currently live in Farmingdale, Maine. Sorry, no website.
Hi Tom — Sorry for the delayed reply. We haven’t yet made a connection between James Bishop and Alice Martin Bishop, but let us know if you find anything. In fact, the evidence we have that Damaris was her daughter is circumstantial at best, but we hope to find more definitive proof as we continue our research, and we’re keeping our eye out for James as well.
Alice Martin Clark Bishop was a distant aunt of mine. Her brother , George Martin and his second wife, Susannah North Martin were my 9th GG through their daughter Jane. My name is Jan Corley and I live in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. I love genealogy. To find out my past ancestors and living relatives today is awesome. Hope to hear back from someone. Thanks. Jan
Hi Jan- Sorry for the very late reply! We haven’t been able to find any information about Alice’s parents or siblings. Where did you find the information about George? Kristin
Hi Erin,
I’ve recently I’ve been looking into my family history lately, I too am a daughter of the Mayflower by Francis Cooke. After doing research I found out he was on the Coroners Jury that examined Martha Bishop. I can’t help but wonder what Alice was going through at the time , and though I obviously don’t condone what she did we did not understand things we do now . There are people that we can talk to now there are medications we can take now and she had none of those and even though what she did was wrong she must have been so lost and scared and I can understand . Yours mine and all of our relatives buried sins, but we are here to carry on and make it better.
-Lindsay
Hello dears,
Apparently the lovely Alice Martin is also my 10X great granny!! I always suspected there was something slightly odd about my family! Nice to meet you all ! We should have a huge family reunion one day and spend it not murdering people! Most of my family comes from New Jersey originally. I currently live there , although I have also lived in many other places. My kids and I are quite amused by all this, although my daughter in law is now wondering what she’s gotten into! I have a family tree on Ancestry.com It’s public and it’s the Genne’-Bacon family tree.
Welcome Ruth! We haven’t been very active on this site recently because we’ve been working on other projects, but it’s nice to know that distant cousins are still stopping by.
I completely understand. It was so delightful coming across this site. This whole ancestry thing is relatively ( heh) new to me, and it was so interesting to come across Alice!!
Love the pun!
Hello, Alice is an 8x Great-Grandmother of mine through a Sutton line to a Smith line to mine. I live in New Jersey and found your site while doing research on my family tree. It is extremely interesting and fascinating. I’ve tried leaving comments before this without success. I read everything and of course have come up with my own theory which I would like to share, but it is 2 pages long. I want to thank you for all your research and riveting articles, they are quite eye-opening and thought-provoking.
Hello! I’ll send you an email and you can send us your theory that way. Glad you found the site. Kristin
My partner is obsessed with genealogy and been able to trace her line to William Bradford and beyond. While working on my line she found that Alice Martin Bishop is my manyX grandmother. So…her manyX grandfather presided over the trial that sentenced my manyX grandmother to hang.
I can’t add anything to that!
We did a cemetery crawl in May and found several Demaris relatives in a cemetery in Connecticut and followed (online) those relatives and they lead to my father in Oregon.
This stuff is awesome!
Gigi Abel
Sorry for the belated reply to your enthusiastic comment! And what does it say about me that I’d much rather do a cemetery crawl than a pub crawl?? Welcome to the site. Kristin
I am also a direct descendant of Alice, and just discovered your site, so have not had time to read everything yet. I am descended by way of her oldest child by Richard Bishop, a daughter named Demaris, born around 1645. Demaris married William Sutton, another colonist, in the Plymouth area in 1666. Between 1671 and 1673 the family moved to Piscataway, NJ. Richard Bishop apparently moved with them, for my records show that is where he died.
I have read that Bishop became an active and devout Quaker in NJ. Since Demaris’s husband (William Sutton) is listed as being buried in The Little Quaker Churchyard in Woodbridge, NJ (near Piscataway), I’m thinking that Richard Bishop is there as well.
I think of Alice often. When you look at the last half-decade of her life, it would have broken almost anyone, with or without a post-partum factor, She lost her first husband; then my ancestor, the second husband, seems to have been a petty thief or had some trouble of his own. And she had several children in such a rapid succession — I cannot imagine trying to keep children fed and warm through an east coast winter. I grew up in Minnesota, then moved to New York City, and that wind coming in from the north Atlantic felt colder than 30 below in Minnesota ever did. So I thank you profoundly for pointing out that those early colonists must have been under considerable mental stress much of the time.