♂John Holmes

John Holmes (died 24 December 1675) was a man of Duxbury, in Plymouth Colony^W, who was at Harvard College in 1658 and may have been called to Duxbury’s pulpit while still a student there. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Joseph Holmes (1665–1733).

His parents are not known. James Savage, whose genealogical dictionary of New England’s first settlers holds the fullest account of him, wrote that he did not know his father: some called him the eldest son of a William Holmes, and the Scituate historian Samuel Deane thought he might be a son of the John Holmes who was at Plymouth from 1632, but Savage accepted neither. No record of his birth or baptism has been found. Savage, following the earlier register of John Farmer, places him at Harvard in 1658, and could not say why he took no degree. He suggested that John may already have been far enough along in his studies to be wanted at Duxbury, whose minister, Ralph Partridge, had died early that year.

On 11 December 1661 he married Mary Wood (1643–1714), whom Savage calls a daughter of John Wood, or Atwood, of Plymouth. Their son Joseph was born at Duxbury on 9 July 1665. Savage notes that the history of Duxbury he drew on names no children of the marriage, but gives John’s death, on 24 December 1675. According to Savage, his widow became the third wife of William Bradford, son of the Plymouth governor of the same name.

Notes

Family trees give his birth as 1 July 1638 at Heptonstall, Yorkshire, England, and his death at Hingham. No record has been found for either, and Savage gives neither an English birthplace nor a place of death. A John Holmes who appears at Plymouth in August 1643, on the colony’s list of men able to bear arms, was a different man. Savage records another John Holmes at Plymouth from 1632, the messenger of the colony’s General Court, who was still there in 1643.