♂John Goodrich

John Goodrich (20 May 1653 – 5 September 1730) was a colonial Connecticut settler of Wethersfield, the son of one of the town’s early settlers, who in 1677 was named an heir of his uncle William Goodrich of Hegessett, in Suffolk, England. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Mary Kirkham Goodrich (1682–1730).

Early life

John Goodrich was born at Wethersfield, Connecticut Colony, on 20 May 1653, according to a Goodrich family genealogy published in 1889. He was the son of William Goodrich (1622–1676), an early settler of Wethersfield, and his wife Sarah Marvin, who had married in 1648. His father died at Wethersfield in 1676, before 14 November, when his estate was inventoried and John was twenty-three.

The English legacy

The following year William Goodrich of Hegessett (Hessett), near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, made his will. The document itself survives among the Connecticut colony’s court papers, and the state’s printed index to those papers lists, under the year 1677, a John Goodrich “son of Wm. & heir of uncle Wm. Goodrich, Hegessett, Eng.”, alongside his cousins Jonathan and Joseph, the sons of his uncle John Goodrich of Wethersfield. The testator’s own brothers were thus passed over in favor of their sons; John’s father had died the year before the will was made. The same papers include a letter of 1678 from Henry Bull of Bury, the overseer of the estate, sending word to his “Cousin Goodrich” in Connecticut of William’s death and the main points of the will. The 1889 genealogy adds that the legacies were to be paid after the death of the testator’s widow, Rebecca, and the index shows the estate still being pursued in 1703, when cousin Jonathan gave a power of attorney for his interest in the Goodrich estate in England. The original will, dated 1678 in the catalogue, is held among the original wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury at the Suffolk Record Office.

Marriage and family

On 28 March 1678, at Charlestown, Massachusetts, John Goodrich married Rebecca Allen; a genealogy of early Connecticut families published in 1856 records that Mr. Danforth performed the ceremony. She was the daughter of Captain John Allen of Charlestown, a sea captain who had died in March 1675, and whom a nineteenth-century dictionary of New England settlers calls the richest man in the town in 1657. The Charlestown church had admitted Rebecca as a member in March 1675/76, entering her as “the dau. of Capt. Allin dec.” In 1707, as heirs of Captain Allen, John Goodrich and his wife conveyed a house near the Charlestown ferry to a buyer from Bristol, according to a published abstract of the town’s estates.

The couple lived at Wethersfield and had nine children, born between 1679 and 1694. Three of their daughters married there under the Rev. Stephen Mix: Sarah married Abraham Kilbourn in 1699, Mary married Thomas Curtis in 1703, and Abigail married Thomas’s brother David Curtis in 1706, so that two Goodrich sisters became the wives of two Curtis brothers. Two of the children died in their early twenties, Rebecca in 1703 and Samuel in 1706.

Death

The 1889 Goodrich genealogy and a standard compilation of early New England marriages both give his death as 5 September 1730; he is said to be buried at Wethersfield. No town record of his death has been found.

Notes

Several other men of the same name have been confused with him. A marriage contract of 1674 between a John Goodrich and Mary Stoddard belongs to another, older John Goodrich, whose estate was in administration by 1685; this John was still living in 1707. A John Goodrich born in 1652 in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, who died in 1695, belongs to an unrelated Virginia family. An index gives a John Goodrich a 1674 marriage at Sudbury, Massachusetts, to a Mary Gibbs. That claim rests on the index alone, and it does not fit his marriage at Charlestown four years later.