♂Experience Mitchell

Experience Mitchell (about 1602 – before 14 May 1689) was an early settler of Plymouth Colony who came over on the Anne^W in 1623, married a daughter of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke^W, and farmed in turn at Plymouth, Duxbury^W and Bridgewater^W. The only evidence for when his granddaughter Mary Washburn was born is a letter his nephew wrote to him from Amsterdam in 1662. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Mitchell (1629–1684); that daughter’s descent from his first wife rests on circumstantial evidence.

Plymouth

His parents and his place of birth are not known, and no parents are named for him here. A Mayflower genealogy notes that he had kin in Holland: a Thomas Mitchell of Amsterdam wrote to him in 1662 as “uncle”, and the compilers think a Thomas Mitchell living at Leiden in 1622 very likely his father, though that link has not been proved.

He arrived at Plymouth in August 1623 on the Anne, a single man. In the land division later that year he and George Morton^W, who had come on the same ship with a wife and five children, were granted eight acres together, which suggests he was living in the Morton household. By the division of cattle of 22 May 1627 he was one of six unmarried young men listed with the family of Francis Cooke, and soon afterwards, about 1627, he married Cooke’s daughter Jane Cooke at Plymouth.

The Mayflower genealogy credits Jane with three children: Elizabeth, born about 1629; Thomas, whose 1672 deed describes land as given him by his grandfather Francis Cooke; and very probably Mary, born about 1632. On 9 May 1631 Experience sold his Plymouth house and garden plot to Samuel Eddy for twelve pounds. Jane died before 1640, probably in the mid to late 1630s; no record of her death has been found.

Duxbury

He was admitted a freeman of Plymouth in 1633 and was taxed there in 1633 and 1634. About 1640 he married again, to a woman named Mary whose surname is not known; the genealogy gives him five more children, Sarah, Jacob, Edward, John and Hannah, born between about 1641 and 1662. In November 1640 the colony granted him fifty acres, and soon afterwards the family moved to Duxbury, where he appears in 1643 among the men able to bear arms and where, over the next decade, he bought up marsh meadow and a house near the Bluefish River. He sat on juries and the grand inquest many times between 1637 and 1677 and served as a surveyor of highways. In June 1659 he was fined ten shillings for refusing to serve on the grand inquest, and fifty shillings for drunkenness, a fine the court remitted the following March.

His daughter Elizabeth married John Washburn at Plymouth on 6 December 1645. In 1664 Washburn sold land he described as given him by his father Experience Mitchell, meaning his father-in-law. On 24 July 1662 Thomas Mitchell of Amsterdam, answering a letter from his uncle Experience, wished “my cousin Elizabeth much joy with her daughter that God has given her to her 6 sons”. That daughter was Mary Washburn (1662–1740), through whom the line continues; no record of her birth has been found, and the letter is the only evidence of when she was born.

Bridgewater

From 1664 the colony granted him further land, and he spent his last years at Bridgewater. After his son Jacob died, the court in 1676 set Experience and his son Edward to look into Jacob’s estate, and in 1678 named them guardians of Jacob’s children. His will, dated 5 December 1684, left his Duxbury land to Edward on condition that Edward care for his wife Mary, and named his other children and several grandchildren. He died at Bridgewater before 14 May 1689, when his estate was inventoried at about twenty-two pounds, including fourteen shillings’ worth of books.

Notes

His birth year is an estimate: the Mayflower genealogy assumes he was about 25 when he married in 1627. The clerk who recorded his will dated it 5 December 1689, after the inventory and the probate; the compilers read that as an error for 1684.

The evidence that Elizabeth Mitchell was Jane Cooke’s daughter is circumstantial. It rests on William Bradford’s remark, written about 1650, that Francis Cooke had “seen his children’s children have children”, since Elizabeth was the only grandchild of Cooke with children by that date. It was once believed that Jane was the mother of all eight of Experience Mitchell’s children; the genealogy now credits her with the first three only.