♂Hugh Gaylard

Hugh Gaylard (died 1614) was a landholder at Pitminster, in Somerset, England, whose name runs through the records of the manor of Taunton for more than thirty years. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Alice Gaylard (baptized 1594), who married Richard Treat and later settled with him at Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony.

Life

In 1573 the Taunton Manor Register entered Hugh Gaylerd at Poundisford, in Pitminster, for two messuages^W and two furlongs of bondland, with three acres of overland in Smalecrosse and Lakemead, in the tithing^W of South Trendle. The land had been Nicholas Gaylerd’s, probably his father, and Nicholas’s widow Johane kept a house and land to live in. Hugh’s name comes up again in the manor’s calendars in 1574, 1581, 1588, 1592, 1594 and 1596. On 4 October 1608 he surrendered a close called Smalerest, in South Trendle, to his son George Gaylard.

A daughter, Alice, was baptized at Pitminster on 10 May 1594, and the index of that baptism names her father as Hugh Gaylard. Hugh is said to have been buried at Pitminster on 21 October 1614. His will was entered at the probate court of Taunton that year, but the document itself has perished. Six months after his burial, on 27 April 1615, Alice married Richard Treat in the same parish.

Notes

Sources

The manor entries, the burial date and the lost will come from John Harvey Treat’s The Treat Family (1893), which prints the 1573 Taunton Manor Register entry, the later calendar years and the 1608 surrender, and lists “Hugonis Gaylerd” of Pitminster among the Taunton wills of 1614 that no longer survive. Jacobus and Waterman’s Hale, House and Related Families (1952) gives the same burial date and calls Alice “daughter of Hugh Gaylard”.

His parents and his wife

The 1952 book says Hugh was “probably son of Nicholas and Johane Gaylard”, which rests on his taking up Nicholas’s land in 1573; the 1893 book was itself unsure whether the earlier holder was John Gaylard or Johane, Nicholas’s widow. No record names his parents. His wife’s name is not known; an online tree names her Joan Alwyn, but no record gives it.

The name

The records spell it Gaylard, Gaylerd and, at Alice’s baptism, Gaylaud; the Latin will calendar has “Hugonis Gaylerd”. American records write Alice’s maiden name as Gaylord.