♂Cornelius Conner

Cornelius Conner (born about 1637 – died by May 1687) was a husbandman^W of Salisbury, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, who had once been a servant in the town and raised eleven children there. When his former master, Richard Goodale, made his will in June 1666, he left Cornelius all his clothes, linen and woollen. Cornelius was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Ruth Conner (1670–1727).

Salisbury

Cornelius is said to have been Irish, and to have lived first at Exeter, in New Hampshire. He had served Richard Goodale, a planter and turner who was one of Salisbury’s first grantees, and by 1659 he was a householder in the town with a wife, Sarah. Eleven children were born to Cornelius and Sarah at Salisbury between August 1659 and November 1676, among them Ruth, born on 16 May 1670, who later married Thomas Clough of Salisbury. Dorothy, the youngest, died on 22 December 1683, aged seven.

Late in 1677 Cornelius took the oath of allegiance and fidelity at Salisbury with his neighbors. According to a history of the Salisbury families, he made his will on 21 August 1684, naming his wife Sarah, and it was proved on 24 May 1687. Sarah outlived him.

Notes

His birth and origin

Hinman’s catalogue of early settlers gives Cornelius’s age as 35 in 1672, and Torrey’s index of New England marriages gives his years as 1637–1687; no record of his birth is known. W. G. Davis, in The Ancestry of Abel Lunt (1963), writes that Richard Goodale “had an Irish servant, Cornelius Conner”; no record gives his birthplace. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary and D. W. Hoyt’s Old Families of Salisbury and Amesbury both place him at Exeter “quite early” before Salisbury. A younger Cornelius Conner of Exeter, who married Mary Gilman before 1701, belongs to a later generation and is not this man.

Richard Goodale’s will

Richard Goodale of Salisbury made his will on 7 June 1666, and it was proved on 9 October 1666. Davis’s abstract gives the bequest “To Cornelius Conner, formerly his servant, all his wearing apparel, both linen and woolen”; the rest of Goodale’s land and goods went to his son and daughter. Hoyt also notes Cornelius as “formerly servant to Richard Goodale” in 1666.

The oath and the will

Hinman dates Cornelius’s oath of allegiance at Salisbury to 11 December 1677; Hoyt prints the Salisbury list of those who took the oath between December 1677 and May 1678. The dates of Cornelius’s will, and its mention of his wife Sarah, are from Hoyt’s family history, which also notes most of the children as living in 1684.

Ruth

Salisbury’s records of births enter “Ruth, d. Corne[lious] and Sarah, 16 : 3 m : 1670”, the third month being May under the calendar then in use. No record names her parents at her marriage or death; the link rests on this birth entry, on Ruth naming children Jeremiah and Rebecca after her brother and sister, and on the compiled genealogies, which agree.