♂John Akin

John Akin (c. 1663 – 13 June 1746) was a settler of Dartmouth, first in Plymouth Colony^W and later in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. He was very probably the John Akin who, as one of Dartmouth’s Quaker tax assessors, was jailed at Bristol in May 1723 for refusing to collect a tax for the support of ministers, and was freed the next year by order of the King in Council. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son James Akin (1706–1804).

Marriages and family

His first wife was Mary Briggs (1671–1708). Family trees date the marriage to 1686 at Dartmouth; the Beekman Patent compilation says only that it took place before that year. The same compilation lists ten children of the marriage, born at Dartmouth between 1689 and 1708. The printed Dartmouth vital records enter the birth of one of them, James, on 1 August 1706, as a son of John. Family trees give Mary’s death as 13 October 1708, the year her last child was born.

About 1711, according to family trees, John married again, to Hannah Sherman (1682–1741), who was born at Dartmouth. Family trees give the second marriage seven children, born between 1712 and 1722.

Public life

A family history written by a descendant states that John Akin was town clerk of Dartmouth from 1696 to 1699 and again from 1704 to 1706, and that he represented the town in 1707, 1720, 1726, 1728–29 and 1733. The same account places those seats in the “Plymouth Colonial Government”, but Plymouth Colony had been joined to Massachusetts in 1691, so any seat he held in those years was in the Massachusetts General Court^W. None of these offices has yet been checked against the town or court records. Family trees also give him the title of captain, without a source.

In 1887 Richard P. Hallowell’s The Pioneer Quakers printed a petition to the King on behalf of four prisoners in the jail at Bristol: Joseph Anthony and John Sisson, assessors of taxes for Tiverton, and “John Akin” and Philip Tabor, assessors for the town of Dartmouth. The petition states that the men were committed on 25 May 1723 and were still held “under great sufferings”. The assessors, members of the Society of Friends, had refused to collect an added tax for the support of ministers; in 1724 the King in Council remitted the extra taxes laid on the two towns and ordered the four men released at once. The petition gives no age or other detail for John Akin, and a younger Dartmouth man of the same name has not been ruled out, but the town, the decade and his second marriage into the Sherman family of the Dartmouth Quaker community all fit him.

Death

John Akin died at Dartmouth on 13 June 1746, in his eighty-third year, according to the Beekman Patent compilation. It gives his will as dated 1 April 1743 and proved on 11 September 1746, and values his estate at £1,330 in real estate and £264 18s. 6d. in personal property, a substantial holding. His second wife is not named in the will; family trees give her death as 13 June 1741, at Swansea. Family trees place his burial in the Akin family cemetery at South Dartmouth.

Notes

Origins

His parents are not known. Family trees give his birth as 16 January 1663 in Scotland; a compiled genealogy of the settlers of the Beekman Patent, in Dutchess County, New York, suggests instead that he was probably born at Newport, Rhode Island, about 1664. That compilation, like family trees, names his father as David Akin, but no record confirms it, and no record of his birth has been found.