♂Edmond Hawes

Edmond Hawes (baptised 15 October 1612 – 9 June 1693) was an English-born cutler who crossed to New England in 1635, lived first at Duxbury in Plymouth Colony, and settled at Yarmouth on Cape Cod. There he served the colony for three decades and died at about eighty. His will of 1692 left a young horse to one grandson unless the boy’s brother Edmond “come again”, a sign that the family did not know whether the absent grandson was still alive. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Hawes (1640–1701).

Early life in England

Edmond was baptized at Solihull, Warwickshire, on 15 October 1612. The parish register calls him “Mr Edmonde, sonne of Mr Edmond Hawes de Hillfeeldes”, giving the infant the courtesy title the clerk used for a gentleman’s family. His father, Edmond Hawes, was a gentleman of Hillfield in Solihull who had bought the lordship of the manor in 1604, and his mother was Jane Porter.

Although he was a gentleman’s son, he learned a trade in London. On 14 February 1626/27 he was bound apprentice in the Company of Cutlers as “Edmond Hawes, son of Edmond Hawes of Solihull in the County of Warwick, gentleman”. On 9 December 1634 “Edmund Hawes, the apprentice of Edmund Warnet” was sworn a free cutler. Within four months he had left England. On or about 5 April 1635 “Edmund Hawes, cutler, late of London” was entered on the passenger list of the James of Southampton, about to sail for New England.

Duxbury and Yarmouth

He settled first at Duxbury, where his son John was born, and moved to Yarmouth by 1643. The colony’s lists record the move. His name was entered in the Duxbury section of the 1639 list of men who had taken the oath of fidelity and was then struck out. He was admitted a freeman on 3 March 1644/45 and added to the Yarmouth section. Robert Charles Anderson’s study of the Great Migration, working from the Plymouth Colony records, lists his public service. He was Yarmouth’s deputy to the colony’s General Court about twenty-two times between 1645 and 1675, and an auditor of the colony’s accounts four times between 1658 and 1674. He sat six times on the committee on the excise. He was named a commissioner for the Kennebec trade on 5 March 1655/56 and again on 6 October 1659. A history of the Barnstable families, published in the late nineteenth century, calls him “Mr. Edmond Hawes, called a cutler, who came from London in 1635.”

Anderson gives his marriage as “by about 1636” and leaves the wife’s name blank. The only child in the family record is John, who married Desire Gorham in 1661 and raised a large family at Yarmouth. A compiled account of the family states that Edmond’s wife died on 19 July 1689. It does not give her name, and no Yarmouth record of her death or burial has been found.

Will and death

Edmond made his will at Yarmouth on 5 May 1692, “being aged and under much bodily decay”. The will names no wife. He left “my Naturall son John Hawes” all his uplands, meadows and marshes in the township and made him sole executor. John’s wife received a cow and calf, the great brass kettle, the brass mortar and pestle and the household goods. Each of John’s children received something. Joseph was left six acres and half of the “Cedar-thatch island”. Elizabeth Dogget, Mary Baron and Jabez each received a cow. Ebenezer got a two-year-old, Isaac and Benjamin “to each of them one Calf”, Experience a sheep, and Desire her grandfather’s own bed and a ewe. The rest of his sheep were to be divided among his great-grandchildren. The grandson John received a two-year-old and a young horse “if his brother Edmond dont come again: But if Edmond his Brother do come again I do give ye young horse to him”. The will does not say where the younger Edmond had gone. There was also a legacy of thirty shillings to John Hathaway of Yarmouth. A codicil of 31 March 1693 let John settle six acres somewhere else on his son Joseph, “to ye sd Josephs Liking”, in place of the land the will had named, and in return John would take the original six acres.

Edmond Hawes died at Yarmouth on 9 June 1693 and was buried the next day. On 20 July 1693 the will was proved before Barnabas Lothrop, who held his commission from Sir William Phips, the first royal governor of the new Province of Massachusetts Bay. That province had absorbed Plymouth Colony the year before. Administration was granted to “Ensign John Hawes of sd yarmouth son of ye deceased”. The inventory of “Mr. Edmond Haws of Yarmouth”, taken on 1 August 1693, came to £130 7s. Of that, £100 was his house, lands and meadows.

Notes

The tree gives his birth as October 1612, taken from the baptism. A 1914 history of the family’s English ancestry prints “b. 1608; bapt. 15 Oct. 1612”. That would mean a baptism four years after birth, during which two younger children, Ann in 1609 and John in 1611, were baptized in the usual way. No record of a 1608 birth has been found. Anderson gives his origin as London. In that work the word means his last English residence (“late of London”), not his birthplace, and the apprenticeship binding confirms that he came from Solihull. Online family trees often give his father a death at Yarmouth in 1693. That death is his.