♂Arthur Warren

Arthur Warren (fl. 1639–1655) was a colonist at Weymouth, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, where the births of four of his children, among them a son named Fearnot, were entered between 1639 and 1655. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Jacob Warren (born 1642), if, as is probable, that son is the Jacob Warren who later settled at Chelmsford.

Weymouth

The Weymouth records name Arthur as the father of Arthur in 1639, Abigail in 1640, Jacob on 26 October 1642 and Fearnot on 29 June 1655; none of the entries names the mother. Fearnot is one of the exhortation names, made from a short phrase, that some English Puritans gave their children in the seventeenth century.

A history of this branch of the Warren family, published in 1890, adds what little else is known of him. It found him living at Weymouth before 1638, records that he petitioned for a grant in the Narragansett lands and owned land in the town in 1651, and notes that his widow held a lot there in 1663, so he had died by then. In 1668, by the same account, Samuel Pratt bought land from Arthur Warren’s children. The history calls his wife Mary but could not find her surname.

No record found gives the date of Arthur’s death or names an estate, and the Weymouth records list no marriage or death of a Warren before 1700. Savage’s dictionary of the first New England settlers, like the 1890 history, gives him a fifth child, a son Joseph, without a date of birth; no record found names such a son, so the printed Weymouth entries stay the whole of what is proved about his family.

Notes

The move to Chelmsford

The 1890 history states that “the children removed to Chelmsford”, and on that statement rests the identification of the Jacob born at Weymouth in 1642 with the Jacob Warren who married Mary Hildreth at Chelmsford on 21 June 1667. A birth in 1642 would make him 24 at that marriage.

The Chelmsford records hold two other Warren entries that fit Arthur’s family. “Abigail” Warren married John Wright there on 10 May 1661, and an Arthur Warren married an Abigail Rogers, the year torn from the page and read as 1667. A compiled dictionary by Savage takes this Arthur as “perhaps” the son born at Weymouth in 1639, and says the Weymouth Abigail married a Wright. Whether the Chelmsford Abigail and Arthur are Arthur’s children is therefore a compiled claim, though the names and the timing agree. The Arthur of Chelmsford had an infant son whose birth and death are both entered there in November 1668, and an estate in his name was entered in the Middlesex County probate records in 1671.

No record found names the Chelmsford Jacob as Arthur’s son, so the link is probable rather than proved.