♂John Allen

John Allen (died 27 March 1675) was a sea captain of Charlestown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Rebecca Allen.

Life

His parents are not known, and no record gives the date or place of his birth. The ages given for him in the Charlestown records, as abstracted in a history of Charlestown families published in 1879, were 48 in 1663 and 57 when he made his will in February 1672/73, which would place his birth about 1615 or 1616. He was living at Charlestown by 1639, the year a dictionary of New England settlers places him in the town’s artillery company, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company^W. He joined the Charlestown church on 22 May 1641 and, according to the same dictionary, was admitted a freeman^W on 2 June that year. In 1666 he was master of the ship Speedwell. The dictionary and a later family genealogy both call him the richest man in Charlestown in 1657, and give him the rank of captain and a seat as the town’s representative in 1668.

The Charlestown history names three wives in turn, Sarah, Mary and Sarah, and lists eight children born between 1640 and 1667: John, the eldest, who studied at Harvard; Mary; Elizabeth; Rebecca; Samuel; Thomas, the youngest; and two daughters named Sarah, both of whom died in infancy. A compiled family genealogy gives Rebecca to his second wife, Sarah.

Death and estate

He made his will at Charlestown on 1 February 1672/73. He died on 27 March 1675, the date given by the dictionary of settlers and the Charlestown history alike, and his estate was inventoried on 28 April 1675. The will left bequests to his wife Sarah and to Samuel, Thomas, Elizabeth and Rebecca, and the estate included 1,000 acres of land and an eighth share in the Charlestown mills. The county’s probate register enters the will under 1675 and names Sarah Allen as executrix. Some of the children were still under age when the will was made. Decades later, in 1707, his daughter Rebecca and her husband John Goodrich, as his heirs, sold a house and about half an acre near the Charlestown ferry.

Notes

A note in Samuel Sewall^W’s interleaved almanac for 1675, damaged where the name falls, records the death of a Charlestown captain and appears to end with the word frater, “brother”. The dictionary of settlers suggested that this made John Allen a brother of the Rev. Thomas Allen^W of Charlestown, but put it forward only tentatively, and no record confirms it.

The same dictionary suggests that he may be the John Allen who came to New England in the Abigail in 1635, aged 30, with a wife named Ann, from Kent. That passenger would have been about ten years older than the ages in the Charlestown records allow, and the identification rests on the dictionary’s guess alone. A Goodrich genealogy of 1889 names Rebecca’s mother as Ann; the Charlestown records name no wife of that name.

A John and Sarah Allen had a daughter Rebecca born on 20 May 1664, in a Middlesex County record printed with the Sudbury vital records, and many family trees place this family at Sudbury on that basis. The entry belongs to another John Allen, who lived at Sudbury in those years: the same Sudbury couple had a son Thomas on 29 April 1666, while Captain Allen’s son Thomas was born at Charlestown on 1 August 1667, entered in the town record as the child of John and Mary Allen. The Charlestown compilations place Captain Allen’s daughter Rebecca before her brother Samuel, born in 1656.

The will and inventory

The will is dated “first Februarye 1672” and “73” in the record, which is 1 February 1672/73 (Old Style). It is entered in the Middlesex County probate records at Cambridge, volume IV, page 218, as printed in One Bassett Family in America (1926), pages 75-76. It names his wife Sarah as sole executrix and names four children, Samuel, Thomas, Elizabeth and Rebecca, some of them still under age. The inventory of his estate, dated 28 April 1675, is in the same volume at page 220.