♂John Goodrich

John Goodrich (died before 21 April 1632) was a clothier of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, England. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son William Goodrich (1622–1676), one of the early settlers of Wethersfield, Connecticut.

Family

The 1952 genealogy, which condenses an earlier study of the family’s English records, makes him the eldest son of William Goodrich of Hessett, near Bury, and puts his birth at about 1575. By its account his father, who was buried at Hessett on 24 October 1631, left him the family’s houses there, so that he held them for only six months.

According to a compiled genealogy published in 1952, John Goodrich and Margery How were married in St James’ parish, Bury St Edmunds, on 7 August 1615. The same compilation lists five sons, John, William “the elder”, Henry, William “the younger” and Jeremy, of whom Henry died as an infant in 1619 and Jeremy died young. As the compilers summarize John’s will, two of the sons living in 1632 were both called William, told apart as “the elder” and “the younger”; the records do not explain why the name was given twice.

Death and estate

The compilers give his will as made on 14 April 1632, and he died before 21 April. He was buried on 21 April in St Mary’s parish, Bury, and the register entry, as the compilers quote it, names him “Mr Jn Gooderich clothier”. As the compilation summarizes the will, he left his wife his house in Bury and certain lands for her life, and afterwards to the four sons equally. The house and lands at Hessett went to his son John, and the other three were each to have £100; all four were under twenty-one. He also remembered the children of his brother Henry and of his sister Susan, gave to charity and made his wife sole executrix.

By the compilation’s account Margery died within weeks of her husband, before the will was proved on 16 May 1632, and the estate was administered by the brothers Thomas and Clement Chaplin, two of the four men of Bury he had named as supervisors.

The sons

The compilation adds that Clement Chaplin, having settled the estate, went to New England in 1635, and its authors judge that “It was doubtless this connection which led the Goodrich brothers to emigrate.” Two of the orphaned sons, John and the younger William, were settled at Wethersfield in the 1640s, while the elder William, according to the same account, entered Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1634 and became minister of Hessett.

The one document found from the family itself is the will that William Goodrich “of Hegessett, in the County of Suffolk, Clerk” made on 12 May 1677. After his widow’s death it leaves his property to the eldest sons of “my Brother John Goodrich” and “my Brother William Goodrich”, who were to come “out of New England” or send for it, but it does not name the testator’s parents. In July 1678 Henry Bull of Bury wrote to his “Cozen Goodrich” in Connecticut that the clergyman had died at Hessett, “near Bury”, and “left no children”.

Notes

The English account

Everything above about John Goodrich’s parents, marriage, children, will and death rests on Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), which condenses the English ancestry given by Mary Lovering Holman in 1948. The register entries and the 1632 will are known only as the compilers quote them; his father’s will of 1631 is also printed in abstract by Lafayette Wallace Case, The Goodrich Family in America (1889). The 1677 will speaks of a house at Hessett; the records do not show whether it was the Hessett property of the 1632 will.

The eldest son John

The 1952 compilers give the son John’s birth only as after 1611, perhaps 1615 or 1616. Holman thought him a son by an earlier marriage; the compilers think that possible but not necessary, since the first two children of a marriage were often born close together and John may even have been a twin of the elder William.