♂Joshua Coggeshall

Joshua Coggeshall (born about 1632 – died 1688) was a farmer of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and a son of John Coggeshall, the colony’s first president under its 1647 charter. He was the seventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Coggeshall (1659–1727).

Family

Joshua was born about 1632, probably in England shortly before his parents, John and Mary Coggeshall, sailed for New England. His grandmother Anne Coggeshall of Castle Hedingham, Essex, remembered him in her will of 1645 among “the children of my son John … now dwelling in New England”. His father died in 1647, when Joshua was about fifteen.

He married Joan West on 22 December 1652; a family genealogy of 1930 says the wedding took place in the Newport house of his brother-in-law Peter Easton. The couple had seven children born between 1655 and 1672: Mary, Joshua, John, Josiah, Daniel, Humility and Caleb. Joan died at Portsmouth on 24 April 1676, and on 21 June 1677 Joshua married Rebecca Russell.

Public life

Joshua took part in the government of Portsmouth. He sat on the town council from 1670, served as a deputy to the General Assembly, moderated the town meetings from 1672 to 1677, and was an overseer of the poor. In December 1674 he signed himself an Assistant.

Death

Joshua made his will on 30 July 1687. He died at Portsmouth on 1 May 1688, a date the Friends’ register records and the 1930 family genealogy repeats, adding that he died “of Measels” and was buried on his own land. Savage’s dictionary of 1860 gives 1 March 1689 instead.

Notes

Death date and age

The Friends’ register of Portsmouth (Arnold, Vital Record of Rhode Island, vol. 7, p. 95) gives his age at death as 65, which would put his birth about 1623. That does not fit his place among his baptized siblings. Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins places him “say 1632”, between his brother James, baptized in 1630, and his sister Hananiel, baptized in 1635, so the birth is kept at about 1632.

Second marriage

The Friends’ register gives the marriage on 21 June 1677 (Arnold, vol. 7, pp. 11 and 30). An 1864 printing of the same register, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 18, p. 241, gives 22 June.

Town offices

Before 1688 the Portsmouth town book names “Joshua Coggeshall” without a mark, and these entries are his rather than his son’s: the son, born in 1656, was fourteen at the council election of 1670, and the town clerk wrote him as “Jun.” in 1679.