♂Matthew Marvin

Matthew Marvin (baptized 26 March 1600; died before 13 July 1680) was an Englishman of Great Bentley in Essex who crossed to New England in 1635, settled at Hartford and later at Norwalk, Connecticut, and died there at about eighty. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Sarah Marvin (baptized 1631).

Essex

Matthew was baptized at Great Bentley, Essex, on 26 March 1600, the son of Edward Marvin; the parish index names no mother. A family history published in 1909 places the baptism at St. Mary’s Church. He married a woman named Elizabeth, whose maiden name no record gives, and their children were baptized at Great Bentley: Elizabeth on 15 September 1622, Matthew on 8 November 1626, and Sarah on 27 December 1631. The register names him “Mathew Marvin” at Sarah’s baptism, and the county archive’s index to the same entry spells him “Mathew Mervin”. He probably served the parish as sidesman in 1621, as overseer of the parish in 1627 and as senior churchwarden in 1628.

Hartford

In 1635 a Mathew Marvin appears among the passengers of the ship Increase, one of the ships of the Puritan migration^W of that year. A history of Hartford published in 1914, drawn from the town’s early records, describes his settlement there. He took a house lot at the northern end of Front Street; the historian takes the town’s land entries to show that he and his neighbor Stephen Hart were flooded out in the first spring, since both soon held second house lots on the road to the Neck. He was one of the original owners of the tract the records call Adventurers’ Field, and in the town’s list of 3 January 1639/40 of the inhabitants with a right in the undivided lands he was given 28 acres. That the Hartford settler is the father named in the Great Bentley register rests on compilations: a Goodrich family genealogy published in 1889 calls Sarah’s father “Matthew Marvin, of Hartford, Conn.” when it records her marriage to William Goodrich at Hartford on 4 October 1648.

Norwalk and his will

By the end of his life he was living at Norwalk, in the county of Fairfield. He probably married a second wife, Alice, before 1647. In May 1659 the colony’s General Court excused him, as a Norwalk man, from the militia duties of watching and training. There, in December 1678, he made his will, describing himself as “aged fourscore years or thereabouts though weake and feeble in body.” He left his wife Alice twenty pounds and the use of the rest of his estate for her lifetime. To his son Matthew he gave his share of the Norwalk land division on the east side of the Saugatuck River; to his grandson Matthew, the son’s son, he gave his dwelling house. His grandchild Richard Bushnell received ten pounds, and the minister of Norwalk, Thomas Hanford, five. He left a parcel of meadow to “my sonn John Bowton and to my daughter Abigal his wife,” and the remainder was to be divided equally among “my four daughters (viz) Mary Adgatt of Norwich, Hanna Semer, Abigal Bowton of Norwocke and Rebecca Clarke of farmington.” Sarah, the daughter through whom the line to the Curtis family runs, is not named in it, nor is his daughter Elizabeth.

He was dead by 13 July 1680, when his estate was inventoried as that of “Mathew Marvin Senr deceased In Norwock.” On 6 November 1680 John Bowton and Thomas Semer signed an agreement, made to keep love and peace between his son Matthew and the other legatees, by which the son was to receive an eighth part.

Notes

The will is entered in the Fairfield District probate records (volume 3, page 58), and the inventory and the heirs’ agreement follow it. In that entry the day of the will is 26 December, though the figure sits at the cut edge of the page; published compilations give 20 December. A compiled genealogy of 1900 also names a daughter Rachel, wife of Samuel Smith, and the will calls Samuel Smith “my sonn,” but nothing in the will shows whether Rachel was Matthew’s own child. Hotten’s printed list of the passengers of the Increase, 15 April 1635, gives his age as 35, which agrees with his baptism in March 1600.

Parish offices and a second marriage

The three parish offices come from John Insley Coddington’s compiled article “Notes on the Ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin”, and are stated as that article gives them. The marriage to Alice, before 1647, is given by Robert Charles Anderson’s compiled The Great Migration. Neither is an original record. The 1659 entry, in which the General Court freed the Norwalk man from watching and training, is in J. Hammond Trumbull’s edition of the colony’s public records.