Joan Jordan
Joan Jordan was the sister of Nicholas Jordan, Esquire. Her husband Edmund Sheafe named him in his will as "my loving brother-in-law, Mr. Nicholas Jordan, Esq'r., for my wife's sake his sister". Her parents are not known.
She married three times. Her first husband was John Kitchell, whom she married at St George's, Beckenham, Kent, on 17 May 1596. Their daughter Frances was baptized at Hayes, the next parish, on 30 January 1596/7. Their son Robert was baptized there on 25 October 1601. John Kitchell seems to have died soon after.
About 1602 she married Richard Lake, a young man baptized at Chelsfield, Kent, in 1580. Their daughter Joane was baptized at Hayes on 28 August 1603. That Joane later married Alexander Weller at Cranbrook on 14 August 1620 and raised a large family at Cranbrook and Rolvenden.
On 17 October 1610 Joan, by then the widow Lake, married Edmund Sheafe at All Hallows, Bread Street, in the City of London. Dr. Edmund Sheafe was a Cranbrook man, baptized there on 17 March 1559/60, and a clergyman and doctor of divinity. He had been married twice before. His first wife Elizabeth was buried at Woodchurch, Kent, on 5 March 1598/9, and that August he married Jane Downe, a widow of Challock.
The marriage made Joan stepmother to Dr. Sheafe's children. Dr. Sheafe's daughter Dorothy married the Rev. Henry Whitfield of Ockley, Surrey, in 1618. His daughter Joanna married William Chittenden of Cranbrook. His son Jacob was born at Cranbrook on 4 August 1616, six years after Joan's marriage, and the Guilford historian Bernard Steiner calls him "the youngest son of Dr. Edmund and Joanna Sheaffe". Jacob was probably Joan's own son.
Edmund Sheafe made his will on 1 November 1625. It was proved in the Archdeaconry Court of Canterbury on 11 December 1626. As printed in 1917, it remembers "Joanne my wife", leaves bequests "to my wife's five children, and to my three sons-in-law which married her daughters", and leaves furniture to Joan "at her discretion betwixt her children and mine". Her brother Nicholas Jordan was overseer. So were "my loving kinsman and neighbour Smallhope Biggs of Cranbrooke, and Robert Kitchell, now of Cranbrooke, my wife's eldest son."
In 1639 her family sailed for New England together. Henry Whitfield led the company. Robert Kitchell signed its Plantation Covenant first, William Chittenden fourth, and Jacob Sheafe became one of the seven pillars of the Guilford church. Robert had married a Sheafe as well: Margaret Sheafe of Tenterden, in 1631. A family history of 1917 says that Dr. Sheafe's widow Joanna "followed her children to America and died at Guilford in July, 1659." It cites no record for this, and no Guilford record of her death is known.
Children
Sources
If Joan Jordan is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Joan Jordan (b. 1575)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joan-jordan-1575-28bc0b.