♂John Shaw

John Shaw (born about 1597 – died after 30 January 1663/64) was a planter at Plymouth, in Plymouth Colony^W, from at least 1627 until the end of his life, who in a deed of 1658 set aside part of his land for four years against the chance that his son John “shall come” within that time. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Abigail Shaw (born about 1624).

Plymouth

His parents and his English origin are not known. Robert Charles Anderson’s study of the colony’s first settlers, The Great Migration Begins, gives his origin as unknown and records neither his birth nor his crossing; Anderson estimates that he was born by about 1597, working back from the likely date of his first marriage.

He was at Plymouth by 1627, when the colony divided its cattle among the settlers: the list names John Shaw at the head of the sixth lot, counted “1 to him”, with no wife or children beside him. On 8 July 1630 he agreed with John Winslow to buy Winslow’s arable land in the tract called “Knaues acre otherwise named Woodbee”, for six pounds, half paid down and the rest in goods or “good merchantable Corne”, and gave Winslow the meadow at the upper end of the land. Anderson finds him among the freemen admitted before January 1632/33 and on the colony’s juries from 1638 to 1649, a highway surveyor at Plymouth in 1643 and 1644, and in several lawsuits with his neighbors over trespass. In July 1633 the court ordered that unless “Mr. Gilson, John Shaw, & the rest that undertook the cutting of the passage between Green’s Harbour & the bay” finished the work by the first of October, as they had covenanted, they would be fined ten pounds. He could not write: his deeds are signed with his mark.

Family and the deeds

Anderson names four children, John, Abigail, James and Jonathan, born by his estimates between about 1622 and about 1631, and finds John Shaw on the Plymouth list of 1643 of men able to bear arms, followed by his sons James and John and his son-in-law Stephen Bryant. The deed of 30 January 1663/64 names “my son James Shaw” and “my son Jonathan Shaw”, and the Plymouth register records that James married Mary Mitchell on 24 December 1652 and Jonathan married Phebe Watson on 22 January 1656/57. His wife in later years was Alice. On 3 November 1653 “John Shaw Sr. and Alice Shaw his wife” agreed with Thomas and Annis Savory to take their nine-year-old son Benjamin into the household until he was twenty-one. Alice died at Plymouth on 6 March 1654/55. A compiled genealogy lists the children “with first wife”, and Anderson counts her their mother only if the marriage went back to about 1622; she may instead have been a second wife.

He settled his land by deeds of gift rather than by a will. On 31 December 1656, before Governor William Bradford^W, he gave his son Jonathan the house and twenty-five acres he lived on, with his meadows, but kept an interest in the orchard, “libertie to Imploy or Improve som smale spott of upland for the planting of Tobacco”, and “a Comfortable habitation with him During my life”. On 26 March 1658 he gave his son Sergeant James Shaw half of his purchase land at Coaksett or Cushena, on the condition that if “John Shaw the son of the said John Shaw senir: shall come within the tearme of foure yeares” from 1 March 1657/58, John should have half of James’s portion, to live on but not to sell. The deed does not say where the younger John was, and the records do not explain his absence. In the last deed, of 30 January 1663/64, the land at Cushena was divided between James, Jonathan and Stephen Bryant, with nothing for John; Anderson takes this to mean that John was by then presumed dead, James taking the double portion due to an eldest son.

That last deed, witnessed by Thomas Prence^W and Samuel Dunham, gave “my son in law Stephen Bryant” his share of land near Namassakett and forty acres called Rehoboth on the south side of the Smelt River, and provided that “my Daughter Abigaill Bryant After my Decease shall have my bed and all the furniture therunto belonging; as alsoe my Chist”. Anderson’s study gives no record of his death or of the settlement of his estate. He was living when he made that deed, and Anderson places his death at Plymouth some time after it.

Lines of descent

Roger descends from John Shaw by two separate lines, and both run through his daughter Abigail Shaw (born about 1624). One goes through Abigail’s daughter Lydia Bryant (1662–1736) and her son Samuel Churchill (1688–1751). The other reaches Mehitable Churchill (1716–1797) through her mother Joanna Bryant (1690–1746), who also descends from John Shaw. The two lines meet again in Mehitable Churchill, whose parents were Joanna Bryant and Samuel Churchill, and from her they run on to Roger through his father’s side of the family.