♂John Phinney

John Phinney was a settler of Plymouth Colony^W who later lived at Barnstable, where the town records note “John ye Eldest Son of John Phinny born at Plymouth 24 of Decem 1638”. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through two of his children.

Plymouth

John is said to have been christened at Lenton, Nottinghamshire, England, on 15 March 1603/04, as the son of Robert Finney. The name was written Phinny in the Barnstable town records; later genealogies spell it both Phinney and Finney. A study by Clifford L. Stott, published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1994 and summarized in the Great Migration Newsletter, traced the English home of the Finney family to Lenton, in Nottinghamshire, and has the family reaching Plymouth Colony late in the 1630s: a widowed mother with two sons, John and Robert, and two daughters, Katherine and Anne. By that account the head of the family, Robert Finney, may have died at sea on the way to New England or soon after reaching Plymouth. James Savage’s genealogical dictionary of the first settlers of New England records the death of John’s mother on 22 April 1650, aged over eighty.

John Phinney and Christian Patten are said to have married at Lenton, Nottinghamshire, England, on 22 November 1636. The Plymouth register for 1649 records that “Christian Finny, the wife of John Finny, died the 9th of September”. The register does not give her surname. Savage’s dictionary likewise gives John’s first wife as Christian, who died on 9 September 1649; a genealogy of the Rogers family published in 1978 by the General Society of Mayflower Descendants also calls the son’s parents John and Christiana Phinney. The Barnstable page that records the son’s birth does not name his mother.

Barnstable

Savage’s dictionary says that John moved from Plymouth to Barnstable and there married Abigail Coggin, the widow of Henry Coggin of Barnstable, on 10 June 1650, nine months after Christian’s death; the Barnstable register writes her name Coggen. By Savage’s account Abigail was buried on 6 May 1653, and on 26 June 1654 John married Elizabeth Bailey, by whom he had seven children born between 1655 and 1665, among them a daughter, Hannah, born on 2 September 1657. The same page of the Barnstable town records enters both marriages and five of the births. The date and place of his death are not known.

Lines of descent

Two separate lines of descent run from him to Roger. The first runs through his eldest son, John, who married Mary Rogers at Barnstable on 10 August 1664, and their daughter Reliance Phinney (born 1681), who married John Morton there on 27 December 1705; James Morton (born 1714) was their son.

Two compiled genealogies point to a second line. Savage’s dictionary says that John Phinney’s daughter Hannah married Ephraim Morton, the second of the name, and the same Rogers genealogy calls John Morton’s mother Hannah Finney. Taken together, they make the wedding of 1705 a marriage between two of his grandchildren, and John Phinney an ancestor of James Morton twice over. No record gives the surname or the father of Hannah, the wife of Ephraim Morton, so the second line rests on those genealogies alone.

The family

Their son Robert, born at Barnstable on 13 August 1656, is said to have died in 1690 on Sir William Phips’s expedition against Quebec^W, New England’s failed attempt that October to take the capital of New France. By the same account, he had made his will on 23 July that year.

Notes

First wife and mother

Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine gives John Phinney’s first wife as “Christian (surname not given), who died at Plymouth, September 9, 1649” (volume 2), and says in volume 3 that “by the first wife, Christian, he had a son John, and perhaps others.” Only the other children carry that hedge; the first wife is stated without one. The Plymouth register names “Christian Finny, the wife of John Finny” but does not name the Barnstable John Phinney, so the link between the two rests on the printed genealogy.

Christening at Lenton

A study by Clifford L. Stott, “The Finney Family of Lenton, Nottinghamshire and Plymouth, Mass.,” in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register 148 (1994), pp. 315–27, gives the christening at Lenton, Nottinghamshire, England, on 15 March 1603/04 of John, son of Robert Finney. The identification of the Lenton boy with the Plymouth settler rests on that study alone.

Marriage at Lenton

The same study gives the marriage at Lenton on 22 November 1636 of John Phiny and Christian Patten. The study prints the last digit of the register’s year as supplied by its editor, and its text gives the date as 22 November 1636.