07/09/2026
Finding Nicholas & Wilmot
A Love Story That Changed the Course of My Family
Sometimes the most extraordinary family stories survive not in letters or diaries, but in the ordinary pages of an old account book.
Nearly four centuries ago, my 8th great-grandparents, Nicholas Edgecomb and Wilmot Randall, crossed paths on the rugged frontier of colonial Maine.
Nicholas was an English fisherman and planter working for the Trelawny fishing enterprise based on Richmond Island, off the coast of what is now Scarborough, Maine. Wilmot was a young English woman who had crossed the Atlantic as an indentured servant, working in the household of John and Alice Winter.
History tells us almost nothing about how they met.
Perhaps Nicholas delivered fish to Richmond Island.
Perhaps he came to collect supplies.
Perhaps their first conversation happened while he was settling his accounts.
History is silent on those moments.
But it preserves something even more remarkable.
In 1643, John Winter entered a routine business transaction into his ledger, recording that Nicholas Edgecomb paid to purchase the remainder of Wilmot Randall’s indentured service because he had married her before her contract expired.
To John Winter, it was simply bookkeeping.
To me, it is one of the most beautiful love stories hidden in my family history.
Nicholas loved Wilmot enough to purchase her freedom so they could begin their married life together immediately rather than waiting for her term of service to end.
That isn’t family legend.
It is preserved in a surviving seventeenth-century account book.
After their marriage, Nicholas and Wilmot settled at Blue Point, now part of Scarborough, Maine, on land overlooking the vast salt marshes of the Maine coast. There they built a modest home, raised a family, and began a line of descendants that would eventually stretch across America.
For the past several days, I’ve been working to reconstruct where that first American home may have stood.
Using:
• seventeenth-century deeds,
• Wilmot’s sworn testimony,
• the Trelawny Papers,
• early Scarborough maps,
• neighboring land grants,
• and modern aerial imagery,
I’ve narrowed the search from “somewhere in colonial Maine” to a specific landscape overlooking Scarborough Marsh, where I believe Nicholas and Wilmot most likely began their life together.
The attached map marks the current best-supported candidate location based on the surviving historical evidence. It is not a proven house site, but rather the place where multiple independent records converge most strongly.
Standing there today, one would still see Richmond Island offshore, the tidal marshes stretching toward the sea, and much of the same landscape that Nicholas and Wilmot knew nearly 390 years ago.
Every family begins somewhere.
For mine, one of those beginnings occurred here.
A young fisherman.
A young indentured servant.
A wilderness on the coast of Maine.
A decision to build a life together.
From that decision came generations of children and grandchildren… eventually leading, nearly four centuries later, to me.
Research like this reminds me that history isn’t only the story of kings and generals.
More often, it’s the story of ordinary people who fall in love, build a home, raise a family, and unknowingly create a legacy that echoes across centuries.
❤️ I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to uncover and preserve their story for future generations of our family.
