66Thomas Delano, married a daughter of John Alden, as is shown by signatures on Alden's estate settlement dated 13 June 1688 (MD 3:11), but which daughter has been controversial. Daughter Mary had been accepted, but in 1947 the Society of Mayflower Descendants decided that it had to be daughter Rebecca instead. The matter had been thoroughtly aired in 1932-33 by letters from various genealogists to the Boston Transcript genealogy column. Daughter Mary had signed the 1688 Alden settlement as Mary Alden, with her signature immediately above Thomas Delano's. This in itself would show that in 1688 she was still an Alden, not a Delano. Thomas Delano was married before 30 October 1667 when the court fined him for copulation with his unnamed wife before marriage. (PCR 4:168). On 5 Feb. 1929 at an auction at the American Art Galleries of New York there was sold for $800 an unrecorded deed of 2 July 1685 in which William Clarke sold land to John Thomas, Jr. and the sale was acknowledged by John Alden, Assistant. The deed was witnessed by Thomas DeLano and Rebecca DeLano (Boston Transcript, 30 Dec. 1632). John Alden had a daughter Rebecca and there was no record or death or marriage by that name. The evidence is indirect, but the preponderance is that Thomas Delano's wife was Rebecca.
Thomas Delano was fined for "haveing carnall coppulation" with his wife before marriage, his wife being Rebecca, the daughter of Mayflower passenger John Alden. The Delano Genealogy has the child of that relationship born on the same day his father was being sentenced (official records show that this son died on 5 April 1738 in his seventy-first year, and so would have been born circa 1667). The parents obviously felt the shame of their situation, for they named him Benoni, a Hebrew name meaning "child of sorrow," more commonly used by New England colonists for a son whose mother died at his birth. |