♂Henry Howland

Henry Howland (died 17 May 1635) was a yeoman of Fenstanton in Huntingdonshire, England, and the father of the Mayflower passenger John Howland. Three of his sons, John, Henry and Arthur, crossed to New England and settled in Plymouth Colony within twenty years of its founding. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Howland (died 1673).

Family

His birth and parentage are not known. Fenstanton, where he lived and where his children were reared, lies nine miles northwest of Cambridge on the old Roman road. His wife was Margaret, whose maiden name is not known; she was buried at Fenstanton on 31 July 1629, and he outlived her by nearly six years, dying there on 17 May 1635. Both dates are given by Elizabeth Pearson White in her volume on John Howland in the Mayflower Families series.

No baptism has been found for his son John, and the family is known chiefly from the will of his son Humphrey Howland, a draper of St. Swithin’s parish in London, written on 28 May 1646 and proved on 10 July that year. It names Humphrey’s brothers Arthur, John and Henry, and his sister Margaret, the wife of Richard Phillips, a shoemaker of Fenstanton. White treats this will as the proof that John Howland of the Mayflower was Henry’s son. A compilation of Mayflower families by Susan E. Roser (1995) gives the same parentage, citing White.

The sons in London and New England

The sons went out from a country parish into trade. Humphrey became a citizen and draper of London, a member of the Worshipful Company of Drapers^W. John went to London before 1620 and entered the household of John Carver, with whom he crossed on the Mayflower that year. Henry, the youngest, was first apprenticed to his brother Humphrey and appears on the roll of the Drapers’ Company on 1 October 1623, but by 25 March 1633 he was being taxed at Plymouth. Arthur, the eldest, followed his younger brothers, and on 28 August 1640 the London lawyer Thomas Lechford recorded him as “of Duxbury in New England, Planter”. Henry the father thus lived to see two of his sons settled in the colony. White notes that the three brothers founded three separate Howland families in Plymouth Colony, which has made their many descendants hard to tell apart.