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Alice Bredda, wife of Valentine Prentice
By Linus Joseph Dewald Jr., Editor
Winter 1997 and Revised 6 Apr 2009
(This is an updating of an article originally appearing in our Spring 1994 and Winter 1997 issues:The Search Continues...Who is Alice Bredda?..And who are her parents? We are continuing our research on the subject of ALICE (BREDDA) PRENTICE and her life following the death of her husband, VALENTINE.
Unfortunately, and as in the case of many women who lived in the 1600s, church and civil records all too often mention only the name of the husband, and tell only about his family and his activities. The result is that the discovery of the genealogy of the wife comes about by happenstance; a researcher may find a reference to the wife tucked away neatly in the Will of a family not known to be related to the wife.
We think it important to identify her roots, as well as to identify all those descendants of ALICE'S second marriage would be half-kin of ours. If you can provide additional information, please contact this Newsletter.
We may have achieved a breakthrough in our search for Alice's roots. We recently came across a copy of a book by Howard Breed entitled A Record of the Descendants of Allen Bread Who Came to America from England in 1630.
Three things about it stood out:
- The two different spellings of the name, BREED and BREAD,
- Depending on how one pronounces it, ALICE BREDDA'S last name could be BREED or BREAD if it were pronounced so that the final letter of the name BREED or BREAD, "d" is emphasized with a hard "duh" sound. BREED could be heard as BREED-DUH and BREAD could be heard as BREAD-DUH.
We obtained the first few pages of the book from Olive Clayton of Salt Lake City. Although not obviously related to our Alice Bredda, there are some tantalizing clues about Allen Bread:
- His first child, Allen Jr. was born in 1626. That means he probably married in 1625 or 1626. Valentine and Alice married in 1626.
- Allen Bread emigrated to America with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, only a year before the 1631 emigration of Valentine and Alice Prentice. One might speculate that they emigrated to America to join Allen Bread.
With the foregoing in mind, we reviewed the material sent to us by our Chelmsford, England, researcher, Stan Jarvis. His material did not identify any Allen Breed. However, his letter of 29 Mar 1989 did contain a reference to the church register at Felsted where there appears the following marriage entry:
"1599 Nov 13: Charles BREEDE married ANNE PURCAS."
That would tie in nicely with Allen Bread;s birth, and Valentine Prentice was born at Felsted. One would have to believe that Charles and Anne Breede had one or more daughters born at Felsted who would have grown up with Valentine Prentice.
Since we have not yet found a birth record for any Alice having a name which is phonetically similar to Bredda, we've requested that Stan Jarvis re-check the church records at Felsted for births to Charles and Anne Breede. So far we have not received a response.
If there are none, than they may have moved to Chelmsford, just as Valentine Prentice did since that is where he married A;oce Bredda 1626. Perhaps Chelmsford records contain references to the Breede children.
In any event, we need to find our more about Nathaniel Prentice of Windham, CT since, in all likelihood, he and his wife had other sons and daughters, not yet known to us, who could be ancestors of other Prentices for whom we've not yet found roots.
Correspondence: If you have any information about the folks mentioned in this article, please send your information to us at the Prentice Newsletter. Be sure to give the full title and date of this article in the Subject line of the email.
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