♂John Stanton

John Stanton (August 1645 – 1713) was a Newport, Rhode Island, man of a Quaker family, a deputy to the colony’s assembly in 1690, whose second wife appears to have been the widow of the colony’s governor, John Cranston. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Mary Stanton (1668–1747).

Life

John was born at Newport in August 1645, the son of Robert and Avis Stanton; his birth is entered in the records of the Newport Friends. His father had been admitted an inhabitant of Newport early in 1639 and died there on 29 August 1672, aged seventy-three.

In 1667 John married Mary, the daughter of John Harndell of Newport. The wedding is said to have been held in a Friends’ meeting. The Friends’ records list their children Mary, born on 4 June 1668, Hannah, Patience, John, Content and Robert, the last born in 1677; a son Benjamin, and possibly a Joseph, are known from other sources. Mary’s father made his will on 9 February 1685, naming his Stanton grandchildren, and died at Newport in February 1687.

A compilation of New England marriages records John’s second marriage, to Mary (Clark), who had been widowed twice, the second time by a John Cranston, and dates it after 12 March 1680 - the day Governor John Cranston of Rhode Island died. John served as a deputy in 1690 and died at Newport in 1713, at the age of 68.

Notes

Death

When his first wife died is uncertain. The marriage compilation puts his second marriage after March 1680, but a summary of her father’s will of 1685 still calls her John Stanton’s wife; the will’s own wording is not known in full. Two compiled genealogies, A Book Called Our Ancestors the Stantons (1922) and Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, give the couple a son Benjamin born 13 March 1684, which conflicts with the date of before 1680 for her death; the question is unresolved. A family book of 1939 gives John’s death as 1725. The stone that marks him, now in the John Stanton Lot at Richmond, Rhode Island, where the Newport Stantons were reburied, reads as transcribed online: “His father, John Stanton, Died in Newport 1713, Aged 68.” That fits his birth in August 1645 and contradicts 1725; the photograph itself is too worn to confirm the transcription. The day, 3 October, comes from a nineteenth-century dictionary of New England’s first settlers, which also gives his age as 72. That age does not fit a man born in 1645. It fits John Stanton of Stonington, Connecticut, born in 1641, the son of Thomas Stanton, according to a history of Stonington published in 1900. The dictionary appears to have joined the Newport man’s family to the Stonington man’s death, so the day is left out here.

The marriage

The year 1667 is on record in Savage’s dictionary and in Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700. The Friends’ meeting detail comes from A Book Called Our Ancestors the Stantons (1922), pp. 30–31, which gives “married Mary Horndale, his first wife, in 1667, in Friends’ Meeting”; that detail rests on that book alone.