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Cotton was the wife of John Cotton, of York County. Nothing is known about the date and place of her birth, her maiden name, the date of her marriage or marriages, or whether she had any children. Historians who have identified her husband as a native of the Eastern Shore of Virginia believed that they resided in Hungars Parish, Northampton County, and had a daughter in the spring of 1660 and a son in December 1662, but no documents demonstrate that either of the Cottons had a relationship to any Eastern Shore families. The first reference to Ann Cotton in extant Virginia documents is dated November 4, 1657, when she and her husband witnessed the will of William Evans in York County, where she and her husband evidently lived from sometime before that date until after Bacon’s Rebellion. Her husband was an attorney and for a time owned a plantation on Queen’s Creek. It is evident from her narrative of the rebellion that she knew most or all of the important people in the county, ....
Cotton has sometimes been identified as the posthumous son of Anne Graves Cotton and William Cotton, the rector of Hungars Parish in Northampton County who died about 1640 or 1641, and as the John Cutten who with his wife Hannah Cutten, of that county, had a daughter in 1660 and a son in 1662, but extant records do not sustain either identification. The clergyman’s only known surviving child was a daughter, and it has been impossible to establish any relationship between John Cotton and any members of the several Eastern Shore families whose surnames in the local records were spelled Cotten, Cotton, Cutten, Cutton, Cutting, or Cuttinge. The earliest known reference to John Cotton in Virginia documents is in the will of William Evans, of York County, which John Cotton and Ann Cotton witnessed on November 4, 1657, when a son of the Northampton clergyman would have been no more than sixteen years old. It is more likely that Cotton and his wife were married adults al ....