♂Edward Gilman

Edward Gilman (about 1525 – 1573) was a yeoman of Caston, in Norfolk, England, with whom the proven ancestry of the Gilman family of Exeter, New Hampshire, begins. Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) descends from him by five separate lines of descent, all of them through his son Edward Gilman (baptized 1557): he was her tenth great-grandfather by one line and her eleventh great-grandfather by the other four.

Caston

He was probably born about 1525. On 21 June 1550 Edward Gilman married Rose Rysse at Caston, a parish about five miles from Hingham. Over the next twenty-three years they had ten children: Margaret, Katherine, John, Edward, Robert, Lawrence, Rose, Joan, Elizabeth and Olive. All but John, who seems to have been the eldest son, were baptized at Caston.

Will and death

Edward made his will on 5 February 1572/3^W, when none of his children was married and his sons were all under age. He left his wife Rose all his houses and lands in Caston for ten years, to pay his debts and legacies and to bring up the children, and after that, for her life, the mansion house he lived in with the lands in Southgate and the wheat field, which were then to pass to John. The younger sons were provided for too: Edward the tenement called Halwicks with its pasture and meadow, Robert the house called Joyse in Southgate and a close called Kynges Close, and Lawrence £20 at the age of twenty-five.

Margaret and Katherine were to have £5 each on their wedding days, and Rose, Joan and Elizabeth £5 each at twenty-one. John was to take up his father’s copyhold^W lands at Saham Toney and let his mother occupy them for her life. Rose was made executrix, with Hugh Potter of Caston as supervisor. He died within months, and the will was proved on 7 July 1573. His youngest child, Olive, was born after his death and baptized at Caston on 21 November 1573. Rose married John Snell in 1578 and lived until 1613.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard’s five lines of descent from Edward Gilman and Rose Rysse all run through their son Edward Gilman (baptized 1557), and all five come down her father’s side, the nearest twelve generations up. All of them rest on a link that is probable rather than recorded: that this Edward was the Edward Gilman of Hingham, father of Edward Gilman (about 1587–1655), who took his family to New England in 1638. The lines come together again in Elizabeth Gilman (1727–1806), in her son Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844), and in Nathaniel’s daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839).

Notes

Sources

His life is known from Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Abel Lunt (1963), pp. 153–156, which prints the Caston parish register entries for the family, as copied by Major Cecil Gurney and Col. Charles E. Banks, and an abstract of the will of “Edward Gylman of Caston, yeoman”, proved in the Archdeaconry Court of Norwich (1573, no. 158). The birth about 1525 is Davis’s estimate, and the year of death comes from the dates of the will and its proof. Constance Le Neve Gilman Ames, The Story of the Gilmans (1950), gives the marriage day variously as 12, 21 and 22 June 1550; Davis has 21 June.

The family’s origin

Older family books derived all Gilmans from Cilmin Troed Dhu, a Welsh chieftain of the ninth century. Davis dismissed this as “nonsense which has been repeated from book to book”, and wrote that the emigrant’s “proven ancestry begins with his grandfather, a prosperous yeoman”, meaning this Edward.

The children

Davis thought John “possibly born about 1554 and apparently the eldest son”; his baptism is the one missing from the register. The son Edward, left Halwicks by the will, is identified as the father of the emigrant Edward Gilman because the emigrant, in a deposition of 1637, gave his age as 50 and named his father as Edward. Davis, followed by Robert Battle in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (2023), takes the Caston son to be the Edward Gilman of Hingham; no single document names both places. Davis also notes a John Gyllman who married Margaret Woodcock at Caston on 6 February 1546, possibly Edward’s brother.