♂John Michell

John Michell (buried 2 June 1620) was a yeoman of the parish of Colyton in Devon, England, who served as one of its churchwardens in 1596 and lived in turn at Cadhayne, Minchinholme and Barretshayes. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Mary Michell (1576–1648).

Marriage and family

He was a son of John Mychell “the younger”, of Rockerhayne in Colyton. On 26 November 1569 John Michell married Emlyn Weeke at Colyton; the register describes her as late of Gittisham, written “Gytsome”. Nine children were baptized at Colyton between 1571 and 1592, from Joan, the eldest, to Dorothy, the youngest.

The register entries follow the family across the parish. He was of Cadhayne when his first three children were baptized, of Minchinholme when his daughter Elizabeth was baptized in 1579, and of Barretshayes by the time his eldest daughter married in 1597/8. He stayed at Barretshayes for the rest of his life.

Later life

In 1596 he was one of the churchwardens of Colyton. His daughter Joan married William Starr of Seaton at Colyton on 20 February 1597/8, and on 10 October 1602 Mary married Rawkey Dolbiar, a son of Robert Dolbere of Cadhayne. Three months after that wedding, on 18 January 1602/3, his daughter Elizabeth was buried unmarried at the age of 23.

John Michell was buried at Colyton on 2 June 1620, entered in the register as “John Michell of Barretshaies”. Emlyn outlived him by eight years and was buried at Colyton as his widow on 30 August 1628.

Notes

Sources

The family is known from the parish register of Colyton, which A. J. P. Skinner transcribed and the Devon & Cornwall Record Society printed in 1928. John Insley Coddington gathered the Michell entries into a family in his article on Jonathan Gillett and Mary Dolbiar in The American Genealogist (April 1939); the dates here are the ones he printed, and the description of John Michell as a yeoman is his. Colyton lay in the peculiar jurisdiction of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, so the wills of its people are not in the printed calendar of Devon wills.

His parents and his family

The marriage of 1569 is entered as “John Mychell, s. of John Mychell the younger of Rawkerayne, & Emlyn Weeke, late of Gytsome”; the FreeREG transcript of the Colyton St Andrew register gives the same entry, with the note “Grooms father John the younger”. No baptism of his own is known. Coddington could not fix the date of John’s baptism, and wrote that his mother “may, or may not, have been” Agnes Vye, a daughter of Harry Vye of Cadhayne. He called his whole Michell pedigree tentative, because the family had many men named John and the register entries stand without corroborating evidence.

The children’s baptisms name their father only. Coddington joined them into one family through the farm names attached to John Michell in each entry, which lead from Cadhayne to Minchinholme and then to Barretshayes, the name he carried at his daughters’ marriages and at his burial. A Beatrix (written “Beaten”) Michell who married Thomas Lee of Sidbury at Colyton on 27 June 1614 is placed in the family by Coddington; that entry names no father.