Jeremy Clarke died when all of his children were still minors, after which Frances Latham married her third husband, the Reverend William Vaughan of Newport.
11 Facts About Frances Latham
1.
2.
Frances Latham' first husband was William Dungan, who was a perfumer living in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields, now a part of London.
3.
Frances Latham held a number of important positions in the town and colonial government, and in 1648 became President of the entire colony, serving for a year in this role.
4.
Frances Latham was buried in the "tomb that stands by the street by the water side in Newport," now lost, but his governor's grave medallion is in the Clifton Burying Ground where several Quaker Rhode Island colonial governors were later buried.
5.
Frances Latham was again a widow with many young children, and within a few years she had married her third husband, the Reverend William Vaughan of Newport.
6.
Frances Latham died in 1677, at about the same time that her husband died.
7.
Frances Latham died ye 1 week in Sept, 1677, in ye 67th year of her age.
8.
Late 19th-century genealogist John Osborne Austin proposed that Frances Latham had first been married to a "Lord Weston" as a teenager, but strong evidence against this was presented by New Haven genealogist Louise Tracy in 1908.
9.
Frances Latham had 11 children by her first and second husbands, and leaves behind numerous descendants, many of them prominent.
10.
Frances' son Weston Clarke married Mary Easton who was a granddaughter of two other governors, John Coggeshall and Nicholas Easton Her son, Latham Clarke, married Hannah Wilbur, the daughter of Samuel Wilbur, Jr.
11.
Besides governors, other prominent individuals descend from Frances Latham, including Rhode Island Attorney General Daniel Updike, Rhode Island congressman Tristam Burges and American Revolutionary War Colonels Christopher Lippitt and Christopher Greene, as well as Major General Benedict Arnold.