♂John Coggeshall

John Coggeshall (December 1659 – 1 May 1727) was a Rhode Island farmer of Portsmouth, on Aquidneck Island, a grandson of John Coggeshall, the first president of the colony under its 1647 charter, and was buried on his own farm, where his slate gravestone, cut in the Stevens workshop at Newport, was still standing in 1998. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Mercy Coggeshall (1704–1778).

Family

John was born at Portsmouth in December 1659, the third of the seven children of Joshua Coggeshall and Joan West, who had married on 22 December 1652, and the second of their sons. Mary and Joshua were older; Josiah, Daniel, Humility and Caleb followed him, the youngest in 1672. Joan died in 1676 and Joshua in 1689.

Joshua was a younger son of the elder John Coggeshall, a mercer from Castle Hedingham in Essex who came to New England on the Lyon in 1632, was expelled from the Massachusetts court in 1637 for siding with the Reverend John Wheelwright, helped found Portsmouth and Newport, and was elected president of the colony in May 1647, six months before his death.

As abstracted in Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887), Joshua’s will, made on 30 July 1687, names Joshua as the eldest son and John as the second, and leaves John 120 acres of the farm with its buildings, partly in Portsmouth and partly in Newport. The copy printed in the 1930 genealogy gives the bounds: John’s share lay between those given to his brothers Joshua to the south and Daniel to the north, and John was to pay his brother Josias thirty pounds out of it. John farmed that land for the rest of his life.

He married Mary Stanton, born in 1668, and the couple had a large family; their daughter Mercy was born at Portsmouth on 22 December 1704 and married Thomas Fish in 1724. John died on 1 May 1727 and was buried on the farm. Mary survived him by twenty years; her will, written in 1740 and proved in 1747, left a bequest to “Mercy Fish, wife of Thomas Fish of Dartmouth, Mass.”

Notes

The Rhode Island Friends’ birth register, as printed in Arnold’s Vital Record of Rhode Island (volume 7, page 51), lists the children “of Joshua and Joan”, with John in December 1659, and the Friends’ marriages give the parents’ wedding as “Joshua, of John, to Joan West, aged 21 years, Dec. 22, 1652”. Savage’s dictionary of 1860 lists the same seven children. Arnold prints the 1656 son’s name as “Josiah”, but the will calls the eldest son Joshua, and that name is the one used here. The will is known only from the printed copy and Austin’s abstract, not from the original in the probate book. No entry for Joshua and Joan’s children has been found in the printed Portsmouth town birth register, which does record several other Coggeshall households. Some modern accounts credit him with colony offices held from the 1650s onward, as treasurer and secretary; those belong to his uncle John Coggeshall, who was already an adult when this John was born.