♂John Churchill

John Churchill (died 1 January 1662/3) was a planter of Plymouth Colony^W who raised six children at Plymouth with his wife Hannah Pontus, and whose last wishes, spoken from his sickbed, were sworn to in court by a young kinswoman. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son William Churchill (born 1656).

Plymouth

Where John Churchill came from, and who his parents were, is not known. He first appears at Plymouth in 1643, in the list of the men between sixteen and sixty who were able to bear arms. On 18 December 1644 he married Hannah Pontus (about 1623 – 22 December 1690), the daughter of William Pontus of Plymouth. The next summer, on 18 August 1645, he bought Richard Higgins’s farm near Browne’s Rock: the dwelling house, outbuildings, garden and orchard, with uplands, land at Woeberry and meadow at South Ponds. The price was twelve pounds, paid over four years “in corne or cattell”. Higgins kept the right to take away the boards lining the inner room, the bedstead and some of the fruit trees, so long as he left thirty good ones. The last of the debt was settled in October 1649.

He was propounded a freeman^W of the colony on 4 June 1650 and admitted on 5 June 1651. On 20 October 1652 he bought ten acres of upland at Wellingsley, in Plymouth, from Nathaniel Masterson, in a deed that calls him “Planter”. He is said to have made his home at Hobshole, a neighborhood of Plymouth town, and to have lived and died there. John and Hannah had six children between 1647 and 1657: Joseph, Hannah, Eliezer, Mary, William and John.

His will

John Churchill fell ill at the end of 1662. On 24 December, ill but “of perfect memory”, he told his kinswoman Abigail Clarke how his estate should go, and it was her oath, not any paper of his, that the court at Plymouth accepted as his will on 3 March 1662/3. Abigail was then about twenty-three. A nuncupative will^W, as such a spoken will was called, rested on the word of those who heard it.

Joseph and Eliezer were to have his lands in Plymouth, except fifty acres the town had granted him at Mannonnett ponds, which went to his son John. William was to have “his purchase land at Punckatusett”, in the part of Plymouth that later became Plympton. Hannah was to have the use of all the land for as long as she lived, and Joseph the new house after her death, or the old dwelling house if he married sooner. Beyond that he was unsure: he “knew not whether there would be anything left when his children were brought up”, but if his wife could spare it, Joseph and Eliezer were each to have a yoke of oxen and his daughter Hannah a cow, “if not two”. His eldest son was then about sixteen.

He probably died on 1 January 1662/3. His goods were appraised on 11 February at a little under seventy-five pounds: four oxen and other cattle, feather beds, brass and iron pots, scythes and sickles, a plow share, two guns, a sword, and six shillings’ worth of books.

Notes

The records

The Higgins deed, the will and the inventory are known from the transcriptions printed in Gardner Asaph Churchill and Nathaniel Wiley Jones, The Churchill Family in America (1904), pp. 1-5, taken from the Plymouth deeds and the Plymouth Colony Book of Wills, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 82-83. The same book gives the 1643 list, the freeman dates and the Masterson deed. The marriage is also in Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700. The deed spells his name “John Churchwell”.

The date of death

The family history gives 1 January 1662/3 without naming a record. It fits the other dates: he spoke his will on 24 December 1662 and his goods were appraised on 11 February 1662/3.

Hobshole and his origin

The home at Hobshole, on the easterly side of the street, rests on William T. Davis’s Ancient Landmarks of Plymouth, p. 331, quoted in the family history, which adds that no tradition fixes the spot where the house stood. The family history calls him “born in England”, yet says that nothing had been found “to give even a clue to the birthplace, parentage, previous residence, or occupation” of the man. He is not in the Plymouth tax list of 1632.