♂John Stickney

John Stickney (14 March 1640 – 1709) was a lieutenant of Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts, who married Hannah Brocklebank there in 1680 and had seven children recorded in the town’s births between 1681 and 1700. He was most likely the seventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mary Stickney (born 1686).

Rowley and the war

John was born at Rowley on 14 March 1640, a son of William and Elizabeth Stickney, who had been at Boston in 1638 and were at Rowley by 1639. By the account of a family genealogy published in 1869, three older children, Samuel, Amos and Mary, had come with them from England. John was the eldest of the seven born at Rowley, followed by Faith, Andrew and two pairs of twins, Thomas and Elizabeth, and Adding and Mercy; a twin of each pair, Elizabeth and Adding, died in 1659 and 1660.

His father made his will on 21 January 1664 and was buried four days later. Of the six younger children who shared the estate, John received the home lands and houses, to be his after his mother’s death, on condition that he pay out of them enough to make his brothers’ and sisters’ portions equal to his own, pay his mother three pounds ten shillings a year and winter her two cows. He stayed in the town all his life. The 1869 genealogy, built largely from the town and county records, has him holding a lot on the Hog Island marshes by 1667 and serving as overseer for the west end of the town in 1673.

In King Philip’s War^W he went as a soldier. By the 1869 account he was one of twelve Rowley men impressed on 29 November 1675 by Captain Samuel Brocklebank, and three weeks later he was in the attack of 19 December in which the Narragansett fort was taken, the Great Swamp Fight^W. The same book records that John Stickney was in the fight at Sudbury^W on 21 April 1676, in which his captain, Samuel Brocklebank, was killed, and four years later married the captain’s daughter Hannah. The service was remembered after his death: in 1733 a township in Maine, Narragansett Number 1, now Buxton, was granted to the soldiers of that war, his name among them.

Town officer

Back in Rowley he took his turn in the town’s offices. The same book follows him through the town and court records: a lieutenant by 1680, when the town granted land to “Leaftenant John Stickne”, a juror at the county court in the early 1680s, a selectman in 1688 and again in 1689, a constable in 1694 and a tithingman^W three times between 1699 and 1706. As constable he was fined six shillings and eightpence in 1695 for not returning the warrant for jurors in time, “whereby the Court was much hindered”. Rowley’s own birth records call him “Lt. John” when his daughter Mary was born in 1686 and his son Samuel in 1690. A deed of 1707 describes him as “John Stickney, Carpenter, of Rowley”.

Marriage and family

John Stickney and Hannah Brocklebank were married at Rowley on 9 June 1680, an entry the town’s printed vital records give as “John, and Hanah Brocklbanke”. Over the next twenty years seven children were born to them there: Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary, Samuel, Sarah, Jane and John, the last in January 1699-1700.

The marriage tied him to his dead captain’s family. On 9 October 1701 he signed, with Hannah’s brothers and her sisters’ husbands, the agreement by which Captain Brocklebank’s heirs divided the estate (a family genealogy of 1869 dates an heirs’ agreement to 17 June 1691), and in 1701 he and Hannah, with her sister Mary and Mary’s husband William Dole, sold 26 acres of woodland that had come to them “as part of our wives portion out of Capt. Brocklebank estate”.

Death and estate

John had died by 4 April 1709, when his will was proved at Ipswich and the register’s record of the proof calls him late of Rowley and deceased. His wife Hannah was sole executrix. The register’s copy of the will names “my Eldest Son Samuel” and “my youngest Son John” and leaves the daughters equal shares.

The 1869 book dates the will’s signing to 26 February 1708-9. Its text of the will describes him as “being Weak of body”, gives Hannah half of his lands and housing for her widowhood and half of his movables, and gives each son a third more than any daughter. It also gives her power to sell a wood lot “for and toward finishing of new house”. The book’s inventory values “A new frame of house” at £12 beside the old buildings, with his carpenter’s tools and books among the goods, and totals £292 5s in real estate and £80 4s 9d in personal estate. On that account he died with a house unfinished.

The 1869 book dates the division of the land to 13 October 1712, “according to his Will to ye Widow and among ye Children”, and prints it in full. Hannah took the easterly end of the house and barn with half the home lot, Samuel, “the elder son”, the westerly end with the other half, and John, “ye youngest son”, a share of the ox pasture and the marsh. The daughters follow, the married ones under their husbands’ names: Hannah Sawer, the eldest, Mary Palmer, Elizabeth Dole, Sarah Stickney, and Jane, the youngest.

Lines of descent

The 1712 division is the document that ties the line to John and Hannah. Its “Mary Palmer” is the Mary Stickney born to them at Rowley on 1 March 1686, who married John Palmer there on 18 November 1709; she was the only Mary Stickney born at Rowley old enough to have married by 1712. The division is known here from the 1869 book’s transcript; the division’s own probate record is not cited here. The next step, from Mary to her daughter Hannah Palmer (born 1719), rests on elimination rather than on a record naming Hannah’s parents, which is why the line is given as most likely.

Notes

John’s birth, his parents’ arrival, the births and burials of his brothers and sisters born at Rowley, his father’s burial, the marriage, the seven births and the title “Lt. John” are from the printed Vital Records of Rowley, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (1928–31), where the surname is also spelled Sticknee and Stickne. The birth entry reads “14: 1m: 1640”, the 14th day of the first month, March; under the old calendar, in which the year began on 25 March, that day would now be counted in 1641. The 1869 book prints the date as “1, 4, 1640”, and George Thomas Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine (1909) gives 4 March 1640.

The 1869 book is Matthew Adams Stickney’s The Stickney Family: A Genealogical Memoir of the Descendants of William and Elizabeth Stickney. Apart from the register’s copy of the will, everything above about John’s land, offices, war service, deeds, inventory, the date and terms of the will and the 1712 division comes from it; its texts of the will, the inventory, the division and the deeds are transcripts with references to the Essex County probate and deed books. The register’s copy of the will is the record for the sons it names, Hannah’s executorship, the daughters’ equal shares and his death before the proof of 4 April 1709, and the book’s text agrees with that copy on those points. The day of signing is not legible on the register’s copy, so 26 February 1708-9 rests on the book alone. The book cites John’s will to the Essex probate register, book 10, page 50, and gives no exact date of death, only that he “died in the year 1709”. The same book prints his father’s will of 1664, which names “my sone John Stickney” among eight living children; the will is printed again from the county’s probate files in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, volume II (1917), and the two transcripts agree. The births of Samuel, Amos and Mary in England rest on the 1869 book alone. The same book also prints an entry in the colony treasurer’s account book crediting him £2 14s for military service under Major Appleton. The 1909 history repeats its account of the war service and the offices. Rowley’s printed death records have no entry for John.