♂John Whitcomb

John Whitcomb (died 24 September 1662) was a planter from Taunton in Somerset who settled at Scituate in Plymouth Colony^W and ended his life at Lancaster in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Catharine Whitcomb.

England

John Whitcomb and Frances Coggan were married at the church of St Mary Magdalene in Taunton on 26 November 1623. Frances was a daughter of Henry Cogan, a Taunton clothier who had died in 1612. Their children John, Jonathan and Robert were baptized there in 1626, 1628 and 1629, and a daughter Joane in 1634. Catharine, the eldest daughter, was probably born about 1624.

Dorchester and Scituate

In 1635 the family is said to have crossed to New England in the Hopewell, John and Frances with five children, and settled first at Dorchester. Job followed in 1636 and Josiah, born at Dorchester, in 1638, and the family was completed by two daughters, Abigail and Mary, the youngest.

By 1640 John had moved to Scituate, where he paid Christopher Winter £45 for a house with four acres of upland and three of marsh, a twenty-acre lot of upland at the Third Cliff, and nine acres of marsh beside it. In 1644 Catharine married Rodulphus Elmes there, and the two men went on to act together. On 1 December 1646 both were among the Scituate planters who bought shares from Timothy Hatherly in a tract on the town’s northern border, running up to the neck the natives called Conahasset, and both were propounded as freemen^W of the colony at the court of 1651.

Lancaster

By the mid-1650s the family had moved inland to Lancaster, leaving Catharine and Robert in Scituate. John died at Lancaster on 24 September 1662, apparently without a will. His estate was inventoried on 2 October, and on 7 October the family in Lancaster asked for it to be divided among them. Catharine and Robert were not part of the division; they are said to have already received their shares. Frances outlived him by almost nine years.

Notes

Sources for his life

The 1623 marriage and the four Taunton baptisms come from the FamilySearch index of Somerset church records, which spells the name “Whetcomb” and “Whetcombe” and the bride “Francis Coggan”. The index gives the son John’s baptism as 2 August 1626; Charles Holman’s Scott genealogy (1919) gives 6 August. The sons John, Jonathan and Robert carry the same names as the New England sons, which is what ties the Taunton couple to the Lancaster one. The 1635 crossing in the Hopewell “with his wife and five children” is from Burton W. Spear’s Search for the Passengers of the Mary & John 1630, volume 23. Catharine and the four children baptized at Taunton make the five. James Savage’s dictionary of New England settlers places him at Dorchester in 1635 and dates his admission as a freeman of Plymouth Colony to 3 June 1652. The death date, the inventory of 2 October 1662 and Josiah’s birth at Dorchester come from Charlotte Whitcomb’s The Whitcomb Family in America (1904) and from Holman; the division petition of 7 October 1662 is known from an abstract of the Middlesex probate papers. Holman gives the reason Catharine and Robert were left out: they “were in Scituate and doubtless had received their shares of his estate.”

The Scituate records

The house and land at Scituate were bought from Christopher Winter in a deed entered among the Plymouth Colony deeds of 1640. In the Conahasset deed of 1 December 1646 he is “John Whetcom planter”, and “Redulfus Elmes planter” is in the same list of buyers; both names appear again in the list of men propounded as freemen in 1651.

A will, or none

James Savage wrote that John left a will naming his widow Frances, four sons and his youngest daughter Mary as executrix. The Whitcomb family history and Holman instead have him die without a will, with the inventory and the petition to divide his estate.

His age and parents

George E. McCracken, writing on the Cogan family in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (1957), gives his age at death as about 74, and Spear has him born about 1588. His parents were Thomas Whitcomb and Joanna Pope. Robin Bush’s abstracts of the Taunton court rolls, printed in Spear’s Search for the Passengers of the Mary & John 1630, volume 26 (pages 61 to 70), name his parents, written Thomas Whetcombe and Johanna Pope in the rolls. Spear’s volume 23 had suggested he may have been related to a John Whetcombe of Sherborne in Dorset, whose will is dated 1598; the later volume supersedes that suggestion.