♂John Smith

John Smith (died after 1700) was a minister in Plymouth Colony^W, known from printed histories as an early settler of Barnstable who stood up for the Quakers and later became pastor of the church at Sandwich. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Benjamin Smith (1659–1720).

Barnstable

Charles Banks’s history of Martha’s Vineyard, published in 1925, places John at Barnstable before 1643. Banks dates the marriage to Susanna Hinckley 13 June 1643, and names her as a daughter of Samuel Hinckley and a sister of Thomas Hinckley^W, later governor of Plymouth Colony. Their contract of marriage, dated 22 May 1643, is one of only three entries that the Barnstable pastor John Lothrop^W kept in his church records under the heading “Contraction”, as Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter notes; the entry puts the contract “at o[ur] Syster Hinckleyes house”.

Banks names thirteen children born to them between April 1644 and December 1667. Seven of them were baptized in Rev. John Lothrop’s Barnstable church register between 1644 and 1653, and two of those seven, Ebenezer and the elder John, were buried as infants. Among the thirteen was Benjamin, born on 7 January 1658/59, through whom the family reached Martha’s Vineyard.

John joined the Barnstable church on 6 October 1644, was made a freeman^W of the colony on 5 June 1651, and served as a deputy to its General Court, in 1656 and 1657 by the dates in James Savage’s dictionary of early New England settlers. Banks records that the colony appointed him to attend the meetings of the Quakers and hear their defence, and that he reported in their favour. Savage dates this to 1659 and adds that John and Isaac Robinson went further and advised the repeal of the colony’s laws against them.

His conscience also put him at odds with his own church. He withdrew from its communion and was, in Banks’s words, “declared noe member for that reason only”, though he was later restored and preached at Barnstable from time to time. In September 1661 he led in gathering a new church, which a council refused to approve.

Sandwich

Savage writes that John moved to New York for a short time. He then accepted a call to be pastor at Sandwich, and Banks gives his years there as 1673 to 1689. Neither Banks nor Savage gives the date of his death; Savage says only that he died after 1690. A Sandwich record gives the day of his death as 2 October, but its year is worn away, so the record places the death only after 1700.

Notes

Both John Smith and Susanna Hinckley are known only from printed sources. Banks writes of John as the ancestor of the second Smith family on Martha’s Vineyard, the line of his son Benjamin.

Savage gives the date John joined the Barnstable church as 13 October 1644, a week later than Banks’s 6 October.

Banks’s range of birth dates for the children begins in April 1644, but the earliest child baptism in the Barnstable register is on 20 October 1644.

George Thomas Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine gives other years for John’s pastorates: Barnstable from 1663, succeeding William Sargent, and Sandwich from 1676 until 1688.

The birth and death figures

Older sources give John Smith a birth about 1614 in England, an age of seventy-four in 1688 and an age of ninety-six at death, and a death on 2 October 1710. Little’s book gives that death date, hedged as probable, and the 1994 family chart gives the same birth and death dates to his wife. Those figures do not belong to John Smith. The New England Historical and Genealogical Register (31 (1877), p. 437) says that his native place is not known, and that the particulars drawn from a document of 8 February 1651 relate to John Chipman. Freeman’s History of Cape Cod works out the ages from that deposition (2:80), and Little’s 1710 is simply 1614 plus ninety-six. The Sandwich record gives the entry as “Mr. John Smith died Oct. 2, 17-“, with the last figure of the year worn away. No record gives his birth or his parents, and the only firm point is that he died after 2 October 1700.