♂John Williams

John Williams (died between December 1667 and March 1668) was a farmer and an early settler of Scituate in Plymouth Colony^W and, in the 1640s, one of the town’s deputies to the colony’s General Court. In his will, made in December 1667, he left his house, his land and nearly all his cattle and goods to his daughter Mary and made her his sole executrix, while his two sons received ten pounds and five pounds. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Mary Williams (died 1695).

Scituate

He is said to have come to New England as early as 1632, but the colony’s records first name him on 5 March 1638/9, when he was proposed as a freeman^W of Plymouth Colony. He was admitted and sworn on 3 December 1639. He was one of Scituate’s deputies to the General Court, then called committees, first in June 1640 and again several times between 1643 and 1648, and in June 1647 he was named one of the town’s two supervisors of the highways. In August 1643 he was on the town’s list of men able to bear arms, and about 1658 he was on its list of freemen, as the elder of the two Johns.

On 1 December 1646 a deed from Timothy Hatherly gave John Williams, then a farmer, a one thirtieth share of the Conihasset tract along with the other Scituate partners, and that share is most likely the land his will later left to Mary as “within Cohassett bounds”. On 7 June 1648 Samuel Mayo sued him for trespass, claiming £40, but the suit was dismissed when Mayo did not appear to pursue it. In 1649 he is said to have bought marsh and upland at the Great Neck from John Woodfield, and in June 1650 he served as a juror at a trial before the General Court.

The colony’s court returned to the family again and again. In October 1662 the court named four men to divide land that he held in partnership with his son John, then an ensign, and in March 1662/3 a jury was called for the same division. That same March the court sentenced Moses Crooker, a boy of thirteen, to be whipped for breaking into the house of John’s son Edward, and bound him to live with John for eight years; John paid Edward £5. In October 1664 he had assigned to Joseph Tilden an £80 bond held against his son John, and when Tilden sued on it the jury found for Tilden. Three years later the colony’s Treasurer named him and Edward as fallback defendants in a suit against the son John over a bond to pay the son’s wife Elizabeth £10 a year, seven weeks before he made his will.

His wife was probably named Ann. She is not mentioned in his will and most likely died before him. In October 1657 the physician Comfort Starr sued him for £40 for journeys, physic and surgery on his wife, who had a dangerous sore on her hip or thigh, and the jury awarded Starr £14. The record does not name her. His daughter Mary married Anthony Dodson at Scituate on 12 November 1651. The will also names two sons, Edward and John, and five grandchildren, the three daughters and two sons of John Barker.

Death and estate

He made his will at Scituate on 19 December 1667 and signed it with his mark. To Mary he left “all my land both upland and meddow lying within Cohassett bounds”, his house, his goods, bedding, clothes and cloth, the bonds and debts owed to him, “ten oxen and steers and thirteen Cowes and my horse”, and everything that remained once the other legacies were paid. Edward received ten pounds and John five; the three Barker granddaughters shared fifteen pounds, and the two Barker grandsons had five shillings each. He died before 5 March 1667/8, when the will was proved at Plymouth on the oaths of its witnesses, Thomas King and Nicholas Baker. The court granted Mary letters of administration^W on his estate.

The estate did not settle quietly. In July 1668 Mary and her husband sued her brother Edward for keeping part of it and refusing to give an account of it. That jury could not decide the case, and a second suit that October was dismissed, but in March 1668/9 a jury found for them, awarding the £41 15s found to be in Edward’s hands and forty shillings in damages. Edward asked for a review of the case that July.

Notes

Arrival

Deane’s History of Scituate and Otis had him coming over with Timothy Hatherly in 1632, and James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England repeats Deane’s view. Harvey Hunter Pratt’s The Early Planters of Scituate (1929) has him reaching Boston on the Charles in 1632. Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins rejects the 1632 date: the first record of him is his proposal as a freeman on 5 March 1638/9, his children marry or first appear in the records in the late 1640s and early 1650s, and he most likely arrived late in the 1630s.

Father and son

His son John also lived at Scituate and appears in the colony’s records as John Williams junior. The son was chosen a constable of Scituate in 1650 and proposed as a freeman in 1651, so the John Williams admitted a freeman in 1639 and sent as a deputy in the 1640s was the father.

His wife

The name Ann comes from compiled genealogies: Savage’s dictionary, Pratt’s Early Planters of Scituate and Frederic Rockwell Sanborn’s The Ancestry of Frederic Rockwell Gladstone Sanborn (1928). The will names no wife. The 1657 entry calls her “the wife of the said John Williams” and does not name her.

The will and the estate

The will is printed in The Mayflower Descendant, vol. 17 (1915), p. 109, from the Plymouth Colony wills, and abstracted in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 7 (1853), p. 178. Savage dates it 10 December 1667; both printed versions give 19 December 1667. The will does not name the mother of the Barker grandchildren; Savage and Sanborn make her a daughter of John Williams named Ann, who married John Barker. The grant of administration to Mary, “the wife of Anthony Dodson”, is entered in the court orders of the colony for 1667/8, and the suits against Edward Williams in its judicial acts for 1668 and 1669. The first jury’s finding is entered as “non liquett”, that is, not proven.

Land at Conihasset

The deed of 1 December 1646 is entered in the colony’s Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England (vol. 12), which describes him as “John Williams seni farmer”. The purchase of marsh and upland near “Lombard’s rock” at the Great Neck from John Woodfield in 1649 comes from Samuel Deane’s History of Scituate (1831), a compiled town history, so the text gives it with “is said to have”. The link between the 1646 share and the will is an inference: the deed names the Conihasset tract, and the will names land “within Cohassett bounds”. The two may well be the same land, but neither record says so, which is why the text says “most likely”.

The court entries

The entries come from the colony’s Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England: the Mayo suit of 7 June 1648 in vol. 2; the June 1650 jury in vols. 3, 5 and 7, where the day is given as 6 June; the Starr suit of 6 October 1657, the Tilden suit of 1664 and the Treasurer’s suit of 1667 in the same volumes; and the October 1662 division and the Crooker bond of 3 March 1662/3 in vol. 4. The two Johns are told apart in these entries by “Sen.” and “Jun.”, and in 1662 by the son’s rank: “Ensigne John Williams, his son”.