♂Edward Gilman

Edward Gilman (about 1587 – before 10 April 1655) was a yeoman of Hingham, in Norfolk, England, who brought his family to the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W in 1638 and in his sixties moved on to Exeter, New Hampshire, where he died. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by five separate lines of descent, through his son Moses Gilman (died 1702), the nearest, and through his daughters Mary Gilman and Sarah Gilman (died 1700) and his son John Gilman (1624–1708), where he is a ninth great-grandfather.

Hingham, Norfolk

He was born about 1587, probably at Caston, in Norfolk, and is said to have been a son of Edward Gilman and Margaret James. On 3 June 1614 Edward Gilman married Mary Clarke at Hingham, in Norfolk, England. He seems to have prospered there as a yeoman, and the couple raised their family in the parish for the next twenty-four years.

Eleven children are known, most of them baptized at Hingham between 1615 and 1634, and five were buried there young: the twin sons Moses and Joshua within days of their baptism in September 1619, Daniel in April 1634, Elizabeth in February 1634/5 and Jeremy, aged six, in August 1635. The six who lived to grow up were Mary, Edward, Sarah, Lydia, John and Moses.

Hingham, Massachusetts

In 1638 the family sailed with the large company of Hingham people who followed their parson, the Puritan Robert Peck, to New England, one of the companies of the Puritan migration to New England^W, and by the usual account they landed at Boston from the Diligent of Ipswich on 10 August, Edward and Mary with their sons Edward, John and Moses, their daughters Sarah and Lydia, and three servants. Their married daughter Mary and her husband John Folsom came in the same company. Before they sailed, on 2 May 1638, Edward and John Folsom had been among the shippers of a cargo of wheat and malt sent from Yarmouth to New England in the Blessing. The family settled at Hingham, Massachusetts, a town begun a few years earlier by neighbors from their Norfolk parish.

On 13 March 1638/9^W Edward took the oath of a freeman^W at the General Court in Boston, together with a group of Hingham men. His nephew Thomas Lincoln, a son of his sister Bridget, had come over five years before him, and is said to have given him about half an acre of his own grant at Hingham, calling him his uncle in the record of the gift. In 1641 Edward is said to have been one of the Hingham partners in a large grant of land at Rehoboth, a share he had sold by 1650 to his wife’s nephew Joseph Peck the younger.

Ipswich and Exeter

He was still living at Hingham in 1647, but soon afterwards he moved to Ipswich, where he was reportedly chosen a selectman in 1649. His eldest son Edward had meanwhile settled at Exeter, on the New Hampshire frontier, and on 10 May 1652 the town accepted the father and his son Moses as inhabitants. On the same day the elder Edward, his son Edward, Edward Colcord and Humphrey Wilson are said to have been granted liberty to set up a sawmill on the lower falls of the Lamprey River, taking timber from the common land for £5 a year; the site later became the town of Newmarket. On 1 October 1652, still described as “of Ipswich”, he sold all his Hingham holdings to his son-in-law Daniel Cushing, the husband of his daughter Lydia.

In 1653 the younger Edward sailed for England to raise money and buy machinery for the mills, and was, by the family accounts, lost at sea on the voyage.

Death

On 14 January 1654/5 Edward reportedly made over his whole estate to Mary, to take effect at his death, apart from £30 each for their sons John and Moses. He died at Exeter before 10 April 1655, when administration of his estate was granted to Mary on condition that she produce “the consent of her children”; their son Moses and their sons-in-law John Folsom, Daniel Cushing and John Leavitt gave it on 29 September 1655. At the court held at Hampton on 2 October 1655 Mary swore to the inventory of his estate, which listed money in the hands of “my son John Levits” at Hingham, of Daniel Cushing and of Moses.

Lines of descent

Nancy Jane Blanchard descends from Edward Gilman and Mary Clarke by five separate lines of descent, through four of their children: Moses, Mary (by two lines), John and Sarah. All five come down her father’s side, through Kenneth Blanchard, and the nearest is ten generations up. 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

Birth and parents

His birth rests on a deposition he made in 1637 in the Court of Requests^W, in which he gave his age as 50 and named his father as another Edward Gilman. Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Abel Lunt (1963), who prints it from the finding of Charles E. Banks, places his birth “presumably” at Caston, where an Edward Gilman, son of Edward, was baptized on 20 April 1557; earlier family books had wrongly made him a son of Robert Gilman. His mother’s name comes from the 1608/9 administration of the estate of her brother Leonard James, which names “Edwardo Gylman marito Margaret Gylman als James”, and from the will of her father Robert James of Hingham, which names his son-in-law Edward Gilman.

The voyage of 1638

The Blessing shipment of 2 May 1638 is from the port books, as abstracted by Peter Wilson Coldham; a Daniel Lincoln shipped with them. The Diligent, the landing on 10 August 1638 and the household of three sons, two daughters and three servants come from the Hingham settler list of Daniel Cushing, as printed by Banks and followed by Davis and the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire. That the three sons and two daughters were Edward, John, Moses, Sarah and Lydia comes from the Folsom family histories (1876 and 1938), and it fits the Hingham baptisms and burials. The freeman’s oath is in the printed records of the Massachusetts Bay General Court, dated “the 13th of the First Month, 1638”.

Life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire

The Rehoboth partnership, the Ipswich selectmanship, the sale of the Hingham holdings (Suffolk Deeds 1:243), the sawmill grant, the younger Edward’s loss at sea and the deed of the estate to Mary all follow Davis (1963). The gift of land from Thomas Lincoln is from Clarence Almon Torrey’s study of the Lincoln–Gilman family (1935), citing the Hingham proprietors’ grants. A history of the Gilman family published in 1869 has John going with his father to Rehoboth, while Davis thought Edward only “probably” meant to settle there.

The children

The Hingham register shows Mary baptized on 6 August 1615, Edward on 26 December 1617, Sarah on 19 January 1622/3, Jeremy on 27 November 1628 and Moses on 11 March 1630/1; the other baptisms and burials follow the same register and Davis. The Genealogical Dictionary gives a second Sarah, baptized on 26 December 1617, but that entry in the register is a daughter of Edmond Hubord, and it dates the surviving Sarah’s baptism 1632/3, a misprint for 1622/3. Sarah’s place in the family is settled by the 1655 inventory, in which Mary calls John Leavitt, Sarah’s husband, “my son”.