Margaret (Ibrook) Tower

Margaret Ibrook was a daughter of Richard Ibrook, who appears among the settlers of the new Hingham in 1635, holding land on Broad Cove Street, the street now called Lincoln, where his grant bounded the house-lot of John Palmer on the west. An island in the harbor was for a time called Ibrook’s Island. The 1893 History records little of the family beyond the daughters who married into the town: Ellen, who married Capt. Joshua Hobart, and Margaret.

On 13 February 1638-39 Margaret married John Tower, son of Robert and Dorothy (Damon) Tower and baptized at the old Hingham in Norfolk, England, in 1609. He had become a resident of the Massachusetts town in 1637 and was made a freeman on 13 March 1638-39. His first house-lot stood on Bachelor Street, now Main Street, nearly opposite what is now Water Street. The couple’s lasting home was the place long known as the old Tower estate, on Main Street next south of the garrison house, near the crossing that took the family name, Tower’s Bridge. The road they lived on is today Route 228.

There Margaret raised the household. The 1893 History names ten children born or baptized in Hingham between 1639 and 1662: John, Jonathan, Ibrook, Jeremiah, Elizabeth, Sarah, Hannah, Benjamin, Jemima, and Samuel. The third son carried her own family name forward, christened Ibrook, a small act of remembrance that kept her maiden line audible for generations.

Of her own voice and days nothing direct survives. We know her by her father, her husband, her sister, and her children, and by the dates that bracket a long life: a baptism in Suffolk about 1620, marriage in 1638-39, and death on 15 May 1700. John outlived her by nearly two years, dying in February 1701-2 at the age of ninety-three. Her stone in the High Street burying ground stands with his and names them together as founders of the Tower family in America. That inscription is very nearly the whole of what the record will bear.

Family as recorded on Find a Grave

Richard Ibrook1583–1651Margaret Clark Ibrook1589–1664

Margaret (Ibrook) Towerm.John Tower Sr1609–1701 (m. 1638)also here

John T. Tower Jr1639–1693Jonathan Tower1641 – unknownIbrook Tower1644–1732Jeremiah Tower1645–1676Elizabeth Tower Roberts1648 – unknownSarah Tower Curtis1650 – unknownHannah Tower Whipple1652–1722Benjamin Tower1654–1721Mary Tower Whipple1655–1712Jemima Tower Garnet1660 – unknownSamuel Tower1661–1723

SiblingsElizabeth Ibrook Hobart1608–1645 · Christian Ibrooke Cockerum1611–1702 · Ellen Ibrook Hobart1622–1700

Relationships are as recorded on Find a Grave.