♂John Mychell

John Mychell (married 1539) was a man of the parish of Colyton in Devon, England, in the years when its registers were first kept.

Marriage and family

According to an index of the Colyton parish register, John Mychell married Agnes Vye at Colyton on 5 October 1539. The registers there begin in 1538, so the wedding is one of the first the parish wrote down.

The 1539 marriage entry names both fathers: the groom’s father, John Mychell, and the bride’s father, written “Harrye Vye” in the register. The groom’s father was then living, so the groom was probably the younger John Mychell. The 1569 marriage of John Michell to Emlyn Weeke at Colyton names his father as “John Mychell the younger of Rawkerayne”, a farm in the parish. There was more than one John Mychell in Colyton at the time, as the words “the younger” show.

Three baptisms at Colyton name the younger John of Rawkerayne as father: Annes on 4 November 1547, Thomas on 19 August 1550 and Johan on 1 July 1554. None of the three names a mother. Three more baptisms to a John Mychell, Mary in 1545, Robert in 1546/47 and William in 1556, carry no “younger”, so which John is their father is not settled.

Later life

In October 1558 Harry Vye of Colyton made his will. He left what remained of his goods to four men and named them his executors, and one of the four was a John Michell. Vye was the maiden name of John Mychell’s wife, Agnes, but the will does not say which John Michell this was.

Lines of descent

He was probably the eleventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Michell (buried 1620).

Notes

Sources

The marriage of 1539 comes from the FamilySearch index of the Devon parish registers, and the FreeREG transcript of the Colyton St Andrew register gives it with both fathers named. The Colyton registers begin in 1538, as the extracts printed in the Conant family genealogy of 1887 note. John Insley Coddington set out the Michell family in his article on Jonathan Gillett and Mary Dolbiar in The American Genealogist (April 1939), and called the whole Michell pedigree tentative. Burton W. Spear’s Search for the Passengers of the Mary & John 1630 (vol. 23) states without qualification that John Michell was the son of John Mychell and Agnes Vye, married at Colyton on 5 October 1539, and calls Agnes a daughter of Henry Vye; it names no record.

Identification

Coddington named the father of John Michell (buried 1620) as John Mychell “the younger” of Rockerhayne (written “Rawkerayne”), from the son’s marriage entry of 1569, and wrote that the mother “may, or may not, have been” Agnes Vye. He could not fix the son’s baptism. The FamilySearch index once gave a christening of 26 September 1541 as the only christening of a John, son of John Mychell, at Colyton between 1535 and 1566. The FreeREG transcript’s note on that baptism reads “Father the elder”, so it is the son of the elder John, not of the younger, and so it is not John Michell. Two baptisms of a John, in 1541 and 1544/45, carry the same note, so the groom of 1539 probably had a father called the elder, and the groom was probably the younger. The link between the 1569 father and this groom is a probable identification, not a proved one, because the parish had more than one John Mychell.

The will of Harry Vye

The will of “Harrye Vye of the parishe of Colyton” is dated 2 October 1558 and was proved in London on 29 October 1558, in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury^W. He asked to be buried in Colyton church and left the residue “unto Peter Lant, Harry Chamon, John Michell, and Robert Whiker”, whom he made his executors. Being named an executor shows a tie between the families, but the will gives no kinship. Most Colyton wills were proved in the court of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, and most of its original wills were destroyed in the bombing of Exeter in 1942 (the Exeter Blitz^W), so no will of John Mychell is known to say when he died.