♂John Porter

John Porter (living 1557–1564) was a man of Bayham, on the Sussex–Kent border, whose children were baptized at Frant in the 1550s and 1560s. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Richard Porter (died 1584).

The Frant parish register, in its typed transcription, records five of his children’s baptisms: Ambrose on 29 March 1557, Stephen on 7 April 1558, Robert on 24 January 1560/61, Thomas on 11 October 1562 and George on 2 September 1564, each entered as a child of John Porter. Three of the entries add that he was “of Begham” or “of Beyham”, the register’s spelling of Bayham. His wife was Agnes. Their sons Stephen, Richard and George left wills in 1581, 1584 and 1585, and together these name six brothers, Richard, Robert, John, Thomas, Stephen and George, and two sisters, one of whom, Mary, married Thomas Aynscombe at Frant on 2 July 1571. Ambrose, the eldest of these baptisms, appears in none of the wills and probably died young; no burial for him has been found. No baptism for Richard or John has been found at Frant; they were born either before the register’s Porter entries begin in 1557 or in another parish. Richard became an ironmaster, holding the leases of Bayham and of the ironworks there when he died in 1584.

John himself is not named in any of the three wills, although each of them names the brothers’ mother, and he appears to have died before 1581. No burial for him appears among the Porter entries of the Frant register. His parents are not known: the register’s Porter entries begin with his own children, and no earlier record of him has been found.