Ursula was the beloved daughter of Henry Adams, said to be "the immigrant ancestor of the Adams family which has given to the United Sates two Presidents, a minister to Great Britain" and respected theologians in the early, religiously orthodox days of the Massachusetts Colony.1

She was the fifth child of nine and the only daughter of Henry and Edith (Squire) Adams, born July 19, 1619, in Somerset, England, near the southwest England Bristol Channel, just south of Wales. She was nineteen, and her youngest brother barely nine years old when Henry Adams gathered his family and sailed for the New World on one of the probably nine ships from England that braved the north Atlantic in 1638.

They arrived in a year that beset the colonists with the most extreme weather Massachusetts can offer up, as recorded by Governor John Winthrop: "The spring of 1638 was so cold in New England that the settlers were forced to plant corn two to three times, for it rotted in the ground. This was followed by a warm summer and two tempestuous storms (hurricanes), the first August 3rd and the second on the 25th of September. The rains continued throughout the autumn and a considerable amount of snow arrived in October."2

The first concern of those early settlers was procuring food. Captain Roger Clapp came ashore at what was to become Watertown in May, 1630, and remembered that "the then un-subdued wilderness yielded little food." Writing of the years up to 1640, Clapp observed, "Fish was a good help to me and others. Bread was so very scarce, that sometimes I thought the very crusts of my father’s table [in England] would have been very sweet unto me. And when I could have [corn]meal and water and salt boiled together, it was so good, who could wish better?"3

By the time Henry Adams' family settled south of Boston in Braintree, property lines had been established and substantial houses built in the several settlements that had sprung up within a few miles of the rocky coast. The Cambridge of 1638 was " but a little village, scarcely 300 yards from north to south and 400 yards from east to west on the northerly bank of the Charles River, three miles west of Boston. Its area was divided by four short streets parallel to the river, crossed from north to south by four others. Within the area were forty or fifty unpainted wooden houses with shingled roofs. A little church of hand-hewn logs, stood near the center of the village. Extending eastward from Harvard Square in what is now Massachusetts Avenue was a row of houses which formed the northerly limit of the town."4

That Ursula was a favorite is marked by the fact that, upon her father's death in 1646, Henry's only daughter was remembered with a bequest of land "in the Neck ... during the terme I was to enjoy it, until returne into the towne's hand againe from whom I had it" even though she was the married mother of three children living with her husband in Charlestown at the time.5

Stephen Streeter arrived in Massachusetts Colony from Kent, England, in the same year that Ursula and her family had landed. Stephen and Ursula were married in 1640, two years later. He was at least the third generation of Streeter tradesmen employed as shoemakers. As did his colonial neighbors, Stephen also farmed. He is noted as a "freeman,"6 a distinction of citizenship that as few as 1 in 10 of the colony's inhabitants were qualified to enjoy.7 To be recorded as a freeman by the General Court, one had to be a mature male church-member, and must have experienced a transforming spiritual awakening by God's grace as attested by the applicant himself and confirmed by church leaders.8 Taking the oath as a freeman allowed one to vote in the affairs of the community in meetings generally held at the village church and, through his local meeting, be represented at convening of the council of the Colony. By this rigorous qualification and the stringency of the oath — oath-taking being a serious matter upon which one's salvation hinged — the church fathers sought orderly governance as well as maintained their influence upon the more temporal concerns of the colony.

Stephen Streeter died after twelve years of marriage and after giving Ursula seven children. Mary, Ursula's youngest child, was born after the death of her father, and one presumes that the young widow had to rely upon her brothers and neighbors following her husband's death for help with the farm, while she looked to providing for the increase of her estate.

Half of Stephen's Charlestown homestead was willed to his son, Stephen, inheriting at the age of 12, and presumably the balance remained to the benefit of his wife, who was about to turn 33 years old at the time of her first husband's death. The sum of Stephen's worldly goods was carefully enumerated by his friends and neighbors Samuel Cartar and Robert Cutler to include his leather-working lasts, lead and hammer, and his household goods comprised of a "little feather bed, coverlet, bolster and pillow, a pewter item, curtains, three bedsteads with six bed sheets, an iron pot and a kettle, skillet and 'a skomer', pot hangers in the fireplace, a fire shovel and tongs with gridiron, twenty pounds of yarn and five keys with matching locks, a Bible and sundry lumber" whose estimated worth was £6.6, locally, by my reckoning.9

Miss Adams became a woman of ample means by virtue of her hale constitution: she was married no less than four times, inheriting properties in towns separated by tracks winding through forest whose control by the aboriginal Indians made distances of a couple of hour's walk quite distinct from one another — Watertown from Cambridge, Cambridge to Roxbury, for example10 — and to walk from one to the other was to chance grievous harm. Nonetheless, after Stephen died, the combination of domestic husbandry, physical need and emotional want caused widowers of the Colony to hazard the distance to court her, and from her first three husbands, the third of which, the unfortunate Mr William Robinson, for example, she gained his "dwelling house, orchard, meadow, hempyard, that part of the new barn and old barn I now enjoy, stable, cow yard, one-half the pasture, [nine] acres salt marsh by the river, and half the fresh meadow by Thomas Trott's and all the planting ground near his house being [eleven] acres." 11

By 1668, the year of the hapless Mr Robinson's untimely death, the property lines of Watertown were well established and recorded, as were those of the other communities of the Anglo pioneers on Massachusetts' shores, as can be discerned from the exactitude of Dr. Henry Bond's graphic record:

1600s Watertown, Massachusetts

While widowed, before marrying Griffin Crafts, Ursula sold Watertown holdings consisting of "a dwelling house and 130 acres of land" (presumably Robinson's estate) on June 27, 1671.12

Ursula made Griffin Crafts a widower March 26, 1673, dying at the relatively young age of 53, having labored with steadfast perseverance to establish an unshakable legacy for her new nation.

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NOTES:

1. Streeter, Milton B., The Streeter Family of Goudherst, Kent, England, and Lynn, Massachusetts; Eben Putnam, Publisher, Boston, 1896, 1929.
2. Daniels, ___, "Generation I - Robert Daniell", http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~danielsofmassachusettsbaycolony/gen1.html - 2003.07.13
3. Clapp, Capt. Roger, Memoir, redacted by John Beardsley, The Winthrop Society, www.winthrop society.org/ doc_clapp.php, 2003.07.13
4. Norton, Arthur O., History of Massachusetts, 1927, quoted by Daniels, op. cit.
5. Streeter, op. cit.
6. Savage, James, A Genealogical Dictionary of th First Settlers of New England..., Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1965.
7. Daniels, op. cit.
8. Stewart, Marcia, "The Freemen of Massachusetts Bay, 1630 - 1636," www.winthropsociety.org, The Winthrop Society, 2003.07.13.
9. Streeter, op. cit.
10. Hubbard, William, Map, 1677.
11. Streeter, op. cit.
12. Streeter, op. cit.