What might we learn? Perhaps nothing.

From Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Mealdieval, in some disrepair, the Woolsthorpe farmhouse nestled into a hill near the River Witham. With its short front door and shuttered windows, its working kitchen, and its bare floors of ash and linden laid on reeds, it had belonged to Newton’s forebears for just twenty years. In back stood apple trees. Sheep grazed for acres around.

Isaac was born in a small room at the top of the stairs. By the terms of feudal law this house was a manor and the fatherless boy was its lord, with seigniorial authority over a handful of tenant farmers in nearby cottages. He could not trace his ancestry back past his grandfather, Robert, who lay buried in the churchyard nearly a mile to the east. Still, the boy expected to live managing the farm in the place of the father he had never known. His mother, Hannah Ayscough, had come from gentlefolk. Her brother, the Reverend William Ayscough, studied at Cambridge University on his way to joining the Anglican clergy; now he occupied a village rectory two miles away. When Isaac was three years old and his widowed mother near thirty, she accepted a marriage offer from another nearby rector, Barnabas Smith, a wealthy man twice her age. Smith wanted a wife, not a stepson; under the negotiated terms of their marriage Hannah abandoned Isaac in the Woolsthorpe house, leaving him to his grandmother’s care.

[snip]

When Isaac was ten, in 1653, Barnabas Smith died, and Hannah returned to Woolsthorpe, bringing three new children with her. She sent Isaac off to school, eight miles up the Great North Road, to Grantham, a market town of a few hundred families—now a garrison town, too. Grantham had two inns, a church, a guild hall, an apothecary, and two mills for grinding corn and malt. Eight miles was too far to walk each day; Isaac boarded with the apothecary, William Clarke, on High Street. The boy slept in the garret and left signs of his presence, carving his name into the boards and drawing in charcoal on the walls: birds and beasts, men and ships, and pure abstract circles and triangles. 

 In my genealogical research, this is an interesting case.

My 7th great-grandfather, Thomas Morehouse (1668-1698) died tragically young at thirty years of age in Fairfield, Connecticut, at the time still not much more than a frontier Puritan village.  Looking at his will and later that of his wife Mary Hill Morehouse (1670-1746), I am confronted with a set of outcomes which are difficult to interpret.  

Mary Hill Morehouse was widowed in the same year a near neighbor, Joseph Sturges was widowed.  Joseph Sturges had been married twice before.  By his first wife he had a single son.  By his second wife, Sarah Judson, he had five further children, all under eight years old when Sarah died.  

Given the circumstances of life in a small colonial frontier Puritan village, options were constrained.  A male widower could not have a female servant in the home to look after the children.  He had to remarry immediately.  

Here is where it gets interestingly complicated.  It is clear from Thomas Morehouse's will, administered for two decades until all his children reached their majority, that some of the Morehouse children were scattered among friends of the family and among Thomas's brothers and sisters, though at least one seems to have joined Mary Hill Morehouse in the Sturges household.

Mary Hill Morehouse and Joseph Sturges went on to have a further five children themselves.  Between Joseph's six children from his first marriages and the further five children in their marriage, there were eleven children in the Sturges household, not including Mary's five children with Thomas Morehouse.  

This might be the explanation why some of the five Morehouse children were divided among the Morehouse family.  Alternatively, perhaps it was more a negotiation of convenience as indicated in the case of Hannah Ayscough, Isaac Newton's mother.

350 some years later it is difficult to reconstruct all the considerations.  Hannah Ayscough lived in England, but at a time of Puritan government (though she appears likely to have been Church of England).  Different place, similar time, not dissimilar religious environment to that of Mary Hill Morehouse in a Puritan frontier village.  Both widowed, both making their best way in the world.

To our modern sensibilities, negotiating a marriage which includes the effective abandonment of your child seems inconceivable.  But choices and norms were different then.

While the Morehouse and Sturges families were both successful and prosperous given their frontier existence, there is the further issue of English class which dominated Hannah Ayscough's life in a way that the more egalitarian Puritans did not countenance.

Isaac Newton's childhood experience of abandonment might be in a similar time period as that of the Morehouse children but perhaps it was more a function of place and class than anything else.

My suspicion is that the Sturges-Morehouse family consolidation was simply one of pragmatic limits.  A household of eleven children is boggling.  To have included the five Morehouse children, bringing the total to sixteen is almost inconceivable.  I am guessing that the dispersal of the Morehouse children among family, given that at least one seems to have lived in the Sturges home, was simply a matter of logistical constraints and not a matter of a widower insisting that his new wife not bring further children to the home.  It can, for now, only be speculation.  

None-the-less, interesting to come across the Newton case when dealing with understanding the Morehouse circumstances.