♂John Phinney

John Phinney (24 December 1638 – between 1718 and 1719) was a Plymouth-born colonist of Barnstable, in Plymouth Colony^W, who married Mary Rogers there in 1664 and whose will named seven sons and three daughters. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Reliance Phinney (born 1681).

Early life

The Barnstable town records enter him as the eldest son of John Phinney, born at Plymouth on 24 December 1638. His mother was probably Christian, his father’s wife, who died at Plymouth on 9 September 1649, when he was ten.

Marriage and family

On 10 August 1664, at Barnstable, John Phinney married Mary Rogers, and the town clerk entered the marriage as that of “John Phinny Jur. and Mary Rogers”. The clerk listed their children under it, beginning with a son, John, born on 5 May 1665: a family of twelve, born at Barnstable between 1665 and 1687, two of whom died in early childhood. Their daughter Reliance, born on 27 August 1681, married John Morton at Barnstable on 27 December 1705.

Will and death

John Phinney described himself in his will as a weaver of Barnstable, and the will is dated 19 April 1718. On 18 June 1719 three witnesses to it made oath at Barnstable that they had seen “John Phinney late of Barnstable now deceased” sign and seal it, so he died at Barnstable between those two dates.

John Phinney’s will was recorded in the probate records of Barnstable County, by then part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, which had absorbed Plymouth Colony under its charter of 1691. It shows that his wife was still living. After his wife’s death their daughter Mary Eastland was to have “my best feather bed and bolster and one pillow”, and the rest of his movable estate was to be shared equally among his three daughters, Mary Eastland, Mercy Crocker and Reliance Morton. The remainder of the money that their son Ebenezer owed him was to go, after his wife’s death, in equal shares to his seven sons, John, Joseph, Thomas, Ebenezer, Samuel, Benjamin and Jonathan, and he named their son John sole executor.

Notes

His mother

The Barnstable entry of his birth does not name his mother. The Plymouth register for 1649 records that “Christian Finny, the wife of John Finny, died the 9th of September”, and she is the only recorded wife of a John Finny at Plymouth before 1650. Compiled genealogies likewise give his mother’s first name as Christian, Christiana or Christine, and Roser’s Mayflower Increasings gives her surname as Patten.

The will’s dates

Mayflower Families Through Five Generations, vol. 2 (1978), in its abstract of the will, calls him a weaver of Barnstable and dates the will 19 April 1718. It records that his inventory was taken on 9 March 1718/9 and dates the proving of the will to 19 June 1719, a day after the witnesses’ oath of 18 June. It gives his death at Barnstable between the making of the will and the taking of the inventory.