♂James Treworgye

James Treworgye (died before 2 July 1650) was the first husband of Catherine Shapleigh, who outlived him by more than a quarter of a century and died at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1676 as the widow of Edward Hilton. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Elizabeth Treworgye (1639–1719).

Kingswear and Kittery

The Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire has James Treworgye and Catherine Shapleigh married at Kingswear, in Devon, on 16 March 1617. By the dictionary’s account her father, Alexander Shapleigh, was a leading merchant of Kingswear whose large interests across the Atlantic were looked after by the Treworgyes and by his own son Nicholas.

According to the same dictionary, James was living at Kittery, on the Maine side of the Piscataqua River, before June 1640, and John White testified in 1679 that some forty-two years earlier James and Alexander Shapleigh had come to an agreement with the settlers at and about Sturgeon Creek. In 1640 he was summoned to the grand jury at Saco, in the Province of Maine^W, where, the dictionary records, he was accused of passing the jury’s secrets to John Winter and found unacceptable.

The dictionary shows his affairs tangled with his father-in-law’s. On 2 April 1641, then living in New England, he sold all his fishing-trade property and his whole estate, real and personal, to his wife’s brother Nicholas Shapleigh for £1,500; yet the deed by which his father-in-law made over the same property to James is dated 26 May 1642, more than a year later, and the dictionary’s compilers concluded that his exact dealings with Alexander Shapleigh cannot be known. His daughter Lucy, in a deposition of 1704 cited by the dictionary, gave 1646 as the year she came over, and from court records the dictionary places James in New England about 1647.

Death and family

In the dictionary’s account, like other men of his family he then vanished from the record. The Gilman family history of 1869 says that James Treworgye died in Newfoundland, and Savage’s dictionary of New England settlers that he went there, perhaps only to trade; the Genealogical Dictionary gives no record of his death. He was dead by 2 July 1650, when, according to the Genealogical Dictionary, Catherine agreed to turn the estate in her hands over to her brother.

The dictionary credits James and Catherine with three sons, John, Nicholas and Samuel, and three daughters, Joanna, Lucy and Elizabeth. Catherine’s will, proved in 1676, names Joanna and Elizabeth as her daughters, and remembers two boys called James Treworgye, the sons of Samuel and of John.

Notes

The name

The Genealogical Dictionary calls the surname Cornish, but finds the family at Brixham, in Devon, by 1593 and at Kingswear, a hamlet of Brixham, by 1605; in Maine it later became Trueworthy. Catherine’s will spells it Tryworthy and Triworthy.

A ship’s master of 1637

Peter Wilson Coldham’s Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607–1660 abstracts a port book entry of 27 April 1637 for heifers shipped from Dartmouth to New England in the Elizabeth, whose master is given as Mr. James (or Jacob) Treworthy. The entry does not show whether he was this James.