♂John Ames

John Ames (living in 1610) was a man of Bruton, in Somerset, England, whose sons William and John, baptized there in 1605 and 1610, were most likely the brothers William Ames of Braintree and John Ames of Bridgewater, early settlers of New England. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his son William Ames (died 1653/4).

Life

He may have been the John Ames who married Christian Browne at Bruton on 12 October 1601. On 6 October 1605 “Willm Ames the sonne of John Ames” was baptized at Bruton, and on 2 December 1610 “John Ames the sonne of John Ames”. A Christian Ames was buried there on 4 May 1625. When John himself died is not known.

By the 1640s William had made his home at Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. An Ames family record, still preserved in 1840, named the brothers’ father as Richard Ames of Bruton, but the Bruton register names him John at both baptisms.

The family

The younger son, John, settled first at Duxbury, in the Plymouth Colony^W, married Elizabeth Hayward in 1645 and later moved to Bridgewater, where he was one of the original proprietors, according to a history of the town published in 1840. The same history records that he had no children and that by deeds in 1697 he gave his large estate to his nephew John, William’s son, and to the nephew’s sons. He died about 1698.

Lines of descent

Both lines run from his son William through Hannah Ames, most likely William’s daughter, who married John Hayden at Braintree in 1660, her daughter Hannah Hayden and Hannah Hayden’s son Hezekiah Thayer, whose son Noah Thayer (born 1745) was the father of Mary Thayer (1770–1827). Two of Mary’s grandchildren, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), married each other, so their son Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908) descended from John Ames through both parents.

Notes

His name and his sons

A history of Bridgewater published in 1840, drawing on an Ames family record “still preserved”, makes John and William Ames “sons of Richard Ames, of Bruton, Somersetshire, England”, and an Ames genealogy printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1862 follows it, giving William’s birth at Bruton as 6 October 1605 and John’s as 10 December 1610. The Bruton parish register names the father of both boys as John, at William’s baptism on 6 October 1605, the very day the genealogy gives for his birth, and at John’s on 2 December 1610, so the register’s John, not Richard, is taken here as their father. Another John Ames was baptized at Bruton on 15 August 1610, but he was the son of Robert. That the two boys are the New England settlers rests on these dates and on John Ames’s deeds of 1697, which the 1840 history describes as made “to his nephew John, son of his brother William, of Braintree”.

His wife

The marriage of John Ames and “Xpian” (Christian) Browne at Bruton on 12 October 1601, and the burial of “Xpian Ames” there on 4 May 1625, come from an index of the Bruton register. No record names Christian as the mother of William or John, and Bruton had more than one Ames family, though in that index only one John Ames had children baptized at Bruton between 1602 and 1605. The same index gives three more children of a John Ames there: Thomas, baptized on 6 August 1602 and buried two days later, Henry, baptized on 25 July 1603, and Mary, baptized on 1 April 1613; no record ties them to William or John. Burton W. Spear’s compiled series Search for the Passengers of the Mary & John 1630 also makes “Cyprian” Browne his wife, and gives his own baptism at Bruton as 1 May 1560, son of a John Ames who had married Margery Crome or Brome in 1559.