Up a Tree

John Howland of Fenstanton preceded his brother Henry, subject of the last post, to America, catching passage on board the Mayflower, of all ships, as an indentured servant. I said in that post that he had staked out his own claim to fame, not including possibly being my 10th great grandfather, and now that I've mentioned the Mayflower, you may be inclined to think that my intent here is to brag about his being one of the earliest English settlers, etc. I've found lots of materials to suggest that he had a stellar part in the early founding of our nation, but I want to focus on a couple of specific things involving him and remembering a well known piece of history we should remember. Of course this latter event is one of those I vaguely remember from my school days but well. You may remember some of this first item from a previous post on what it was like to cross the Atlantic during colonial times ("Come Sail Away With Me," Feb. 21). I mentioned that one person was s...

Well, I found my first family scofflaw. He is listed in the family tree as Henry Howland of Fenstanton, and he has a small rap sheet that includes entertaining a married woman in his house, to which the husband objected, and aiding and entertaining Quakers. Didn't know those were crimes? Welcome to the early Plymouth colony in Massachusetts, where being a Quaker could result in a variety of punishments, including hanging. First a quick bit about Henry.  He was born in Fenstanton, Huntingdonshire, England in about 1603. I'm not sure when he immigrated to America, but he appears in a list detailing an allotment of cattle to the settlers in 1624. He and two of his brothers, John and Arthur, all came over, but not on the same ship. John, who is my great-to-the-x grandfather, has his own claim to fame that I'll look at next week, so Henry is a many times removed uncle.  We know John came as a servant, something many immigrants did in order to afford passage, and presumably his b...

Having read entirely too many wills during my brief stint as a paralegal working in an oil and gas related law firm, I've wondered about wills and who had what rights in Colonial America. I have read some of the wills of our family's ancestors and thought about writing a post about them ,but I never saved any of the reproductions. Until now. Fortunately, John Choate, who may have testified at a with trial in colonial Massachusetts, made out a will in 1691, and a reproduction is attached to his entry in Family Search.  He begins by stating that he is sick in body but of sound mind, kind of a standard opening for a will. I have noticed several wills in which the writer noted that he was in poor health -- and I say "he" because so far I have only read wills by men, not uncommon because married women had limited rights to property that pretty much obviated the need to make a will. The reference to the writer's health seems to indicate that poor health provides the imp...

I decided to begin exploring a new segment of the family tree until I finish creating a database of the posts in this series, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a reference to the famous witch trials of the 1600s. And it's possible that one of my ancestors was called as a witness in the trial of a woman who was given a reprieve. John Choate came to America in 1643 from Essex County, England at the age of 19. According to a document titled, "John Choate and His Descendants," which may well be the subtitle to a book called The Choates in America 1643-1896 , by E.O. Jameson and published in Boston in 1896, not much is available about the details of his life. By "not much," the author seems to mean more than the 1,000 or so words excerpted from the work and provided on Family Search. To me, that much material is a gold mine. John settled in a section of Ipswich, Mass., know as Chebacco and married some 17 years later. He managed to purchase some land fo...

Last time we looked at the entry on my side of the tree for Lady Margaret Woodville, whose identity remains shrouded. But she also provides a jumping off place to a new limb of the tree. Lady Margaret's entry shows she married a John James Watson I, about whom I can find nothing remarkable. His importance lies in his lineage. Now given the problems I've described with Lady Margaret, you'll have to take what follows as speculative in terms of any actual relationship I may have. John James seems to be the first of the Watsons in England. His forefathers' ties lie in Scotland for many generations. If you track back far enough, you run into ancestors who hail from what is now Bremen, Germany. I'll try to find some information on those ancestors for a future post. Now, the Watsons aren't just from Scotland. More specifically they are from Aberdeen. I've been unable to discover exactly how important they were to the daily life of the city, so I thought for this we...

As I've mentioned before. I often check into the tree in preparation for writing one of these posts and find that the details have changed. In the previous post, I looked briefly at Elizabeth Woodville, the White Queen, who at one time appeared in the genealogy for my side of the tree.  She had disappeared from my tree some weeks before, but I discussed her because while I was tracing one of the families in the history of my great x4 grandmother, I ran across a listing for the queen's brother, Sir Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl of Rivers, leading me to believe I still had some relationship to Elizabeth, though removed from my direct line. I announced that I would look at his life for this post. Before logging off last week, I did a run through the tree again, only to discover that he had disappeared from the family lineage, this coming just a week after having found him in the first place. Instead I found Lady Margaret Woodville, who I thought might still have some connection to t...

An impetus behind these posts is an accidental discovery I made while randomly shuffling through the family tree developed by our daughter. As I've mentioned in the past my grandmother's great grandmother, Orpha Morse, is a rich source of ancestors with connection to history. As an aside, I've no idea how to properly express this relationship, but I saw a reference a couple of weeks ago to someone's 8th great grandmother, which seemed to use the generational numbering associated with cousins. If I'm correct about that then Orpha would be my third great grandmother, or something like that. This stuff can be so confusing. But I started roaming through Orpha's portion of the tree and found all sorts of connections to British peerage and eventually to Elizabeth Woodville, whose second husband, Edward IV, king of England, was of the York family, and their symbol was the white rose. That would have meant that I was related to royalty, a situation that may not be as un...