♂Lancelot Ward

Lancelot Ward (died before 1617) was a landholder of Wethersfield, in Essex, England, whose son Robert inherited from him a house at Wethersfield known by the family’s own name, Ward’s. He was probably the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Philippa Ward.

Land and family

Lancelot is said to have held land at Dedham as well. In 1587 Richard Upsher surrendered sixteen acres there, closes called Hillfields, to him and his heirs, and he sat with the other tenants at the Dedham manor court^W in 1588 and 1590.

Besides Robert, his children probably included a son John, whom Robert named as his brother and one of his executors, and a daughter Philippa, who married Samuel Sherman of Dedham about 1598 and was most likely the “Phellep Shearman” who witnessed Robert’s will.

Death and his widow

Lancelot was dead by 8 January 1616/7, when his son Robert Ward of Lexden, near Colchester, made his will and left his eldest son the house called Ward’s, “which I late had of Lancelot Ward my father deceased”. Lancelot’s widow was still living. Robert’s wife was to pay her thirteen pounds six shillings and eight pence a year out of the Wethersfield lands, in satisfaction of her dower^W. Robert called her “my mother in law, the late wife of my father Lancelot Ward” and did not give her name. In the usage of the time those words meant a stepmother, so Lancelot had most likely married more than once.

Notes

His daughter Philippa

No record names Philippa as Lancelot’s daughter. Bertha Stratton, in Transatlantic Shermans (1969), made her a daughter of Lancelot Ward and a sister of Robert Ward of Lexden, though her own pedigree chart writes the father as “Lancelot Ward?”. Michael Johnson Wood, in “The Earliest Shermans of Dedham, Essex, and Their Wives” (New England Historical and Genealogical Register 167 (2013): 35–54), gives her as “PHILLIPP WARD, born say 1575, daughter of Lancelot and Joan (____) Ward of Wethersfield, Essex”, married about 1598 (167:47). His case rests on two wills. Robert Ward’s will is witnessed by “Phellep Shearman”, whom Wood calls “almost certainly the testator’s sister”; the will itself names no sister and does not call the witness kin. The 1652 will of John Ward of Ipswich, Massachusetts, names “cousin Samuel Sherman of Boston, deceased and cousin Philip Sherman of Rhode Island”, two of Philippa’s sons. Stratton adds that Robert and Samuel Sherman each named John Upcher of Dedham as a brother-in-law and an executor. The parentage given here is Wood’s argument.

Robert Ward’s will

Robert Ward of Lexden’s will, dated 8 January 1616 and proved 9 May 1617, is abstracted in Henry F. Waters, Genealogical Gleanings in England, vol. 2 (1901), pp. 1144–45, and more briefly by Stratton (p. 101); Wood dates it 8 January 1616/7. Robert first calls the house “my messuage in Wethersfield, called Ward’s“, then “my capital messuage called Ward’s“. He names his “well beloved brother John Ward” among his executors; Stratton remarks that a brother-in-law was sometimes called “brother” in this period, so John’s place in the family is not certain.

Dedham

The Dedham land and court sittings come from Stratton’s reading of the Dedham manor court records (Transatlantic Shermans, p. 101). She gives a court of 31 August 1587 at which Richard Upsher surrendered “16 A, closes, Hillfields to Launcelot Ward and heirs”, and lists “Lancelot Warde” among the tenants of the court on 1 August 1588, beside Robert Warde and Robert Sherman, and again in August 1590. That this Dedham tenant was the Lancelot of Wethersfield is Stratton’s identification.