Is he is, or is he ain't

I became excited while tracing another branch of the family tree back until it ended. William Sabin, one of Orpha Morse's (she whose line provides most of the best stories on my side), was the first of one particular families of Sabins to come to America, and one of the descriptions I ran across said he was a cofounder of one of the earliest settlements in Massachusetts, a part of the Plymouth Colony. 

All my other relatives to this point settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the highest distinction I had found was that one of them had been a town's first town clerk, in part because he had good handwriting. 

Sabin was cited in a Wikipedia article has having founded the town of Rehoboth, Mass., with man named Walter Palmer. Huzzah!

Now, I know you may be groaning about citing a Wikipedia article, and you have a right to be. But Wiki-p articles can come in handy as a starting place for research, especially if they provide citations. This article cited the town's web page, which I dutifully pulled up. And I immediately ran into a problem.

While clicking around on the available pages, I encountered a page for the history of the town told in 10 objects located in the town's museum. The very first item was a relic from King Philip's War, a Native American uprising we've seen before in the family histories. The page provided a bit of a timeline, which quite clearly pointed to a Rev. Samuel Newman as the founder of the settlement. 

The entire history of the town's settlement is a bit complicated, involving a cantankerous separatist minister named Blackstone, the Plymouth Colony's William Bradford, Rhode Island's Roger Williams and a few other notables before you get to Newman. Long story short(ish) Newman as another cranky separatist who managed to obtain a patent from Bradford for lands encompassing parts of modern Rhode Island and Massachusetts. This area includes the current Rehoboth and several other towns in both states. 

Newman produced an early concordance of the Bible that attained some acclaim and pastored a church, probably Congregational, in Weymouth, Mass. He had some authority issues related to his religious views, and after obtaining the patent from Bradford, he led a number of his congregation to a place on the Pawtucket River called Seakonk -- the modern spelling; we won't go into the variations -- and renamed it Rehoboth. The name comes from Gen. 26:22 and is Hebrew for room. 

This is where William Sabin comes in. The first recorded meeting of the original settlers was held in 1643, where a committee laid out procedures for parceling and fencing the town. The settlers were required to provide the value of their estates. A list of the "proprietors," as they were called, contains 58 names, not including the names of those who had taken over someone's property. 

Palmer's estate value ran to 419 pounds, while Sabin's came to just 53 pounds. Though Palmer's is one of the higher values, Sabin's is on of the smaller. How Wikipedia got the idea these two were the cofounders is beyond me. 

A book found on Google Books titled The Sabin Family in America, by the Rev. Anson Titus Jr., 1882, says that Sabin's name first appears in the list of proprietors, and the date of his arrival in America is unknown. He may have come to America from England or Wales and appears to have immigrated there from France to escape the persecution of the Huguenots, whom we looked at previously in connection to Sharon's family.

Titus writes, "He was a Huguenot, and was a man of considerable culture; and possessing wealth ... He was one of the leading spirits of Rehoboth in schools, church, and in affairs at Plymouth." He had 20 children by two wives, 16 of whom are mentioned in his will. I presume the other four preceded in him in death.

Image from the frontispiece of  A History of Rehoboth Massachusetts, Its History for 275 Years, 1643-1918, George H. Tilton,1882