♂John Mychell

John Mychell (living 1539) was a man of Rawkerhayne, a farm in the parish of Colyton in Devon, England, in the first years of its parish registers, where he appears as “the elder”.

Marriage and family

His son and namesake, John Mychell of Rawkerhayne, married Agnes Vye at Colyton on 5 October 1539, in only the second year of the parish registers, and the entry names the groom’s father as John Mychell. With two men of one name at one farm, the register told father and son apart as “the elder” and “the younger”. A John, son of John Mychell the elder, was baptized on 26 September 1541, and another John on 19 March 1544/45; they were probably his own sons, though no mother is named.

Lines of descent

He was probably the twelfth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Mychell (married 1539). From 1547 the son’s children were entered as those of “John the younger”. That label is how the generations are told apart: when his grandson John Michell married Emlyn Weeke on 26 November 1569, the entry calls the groom’s father “John the younger”, so the grandson was the son’s child, not the elder’s. When the elder died, and whom he married, is not known.

Notes

Sources

The marriages of 1539 and 1569 and the baptisms come from a transcript of the Colyton St Andrew register on FreeREG, which gives each family’s abode, the fathers’ names and the words “the elder” and “the younger”. The FamilySearch index of the Devon registers has the same marriage of 1539 and christening of 1541. The Colyton registers begin in 1538, as the extracts printed in the Conant family genealogy of 1887 note. John Insley Coddington, in The American Genealogist (April 1939), named the father of John Michell as John Mychell “the younger” of Rockerhayne, the same farm, and called the whole Michell pedigree tentative.

The elder and the younger

The register never writes out a pedigree; the generations are read from its labels. In the transcript the father of the two Johns of 1541 and 1544/45 is marked “the elder”, and the father of Annes (1547), Thomas (1550) and Johan (1554) “the younger”. Other children of a John Mychell of Rawkerhayne, Marye (1545), Robert (1546/47), William (1556) and Elyzabethe (1557/58), carry neither word and could belong to either man. No John was baptized to “the younger” before 1575, so the grandson’s own baptism has not been found. The christening of 26 September 1541 was once taken to be his; the word “elder” beside the father shows it was not. That the groom of 1539 was “the younger”, and so his father the elder, follows from the labels rather than from any entry that says so, and is probable rather than proved.

A widow of Rawkerhayne

A widow, Agnes Mychell of Rawkerhayne, was buried at Colyton on 12 March 1564/65. The register does not say whose widow she was.