♂Peter Brackett

Peter Brackett was a man of Sudbury, in Suffolk, England, whose widow and all three children crossed to New England in the 1630s. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), most likely through his son Richard Brackett (died 1690).

Life

Peter’s wife was named Rachel; her maiden name is not known. Their son Richard was baptized at St Gregory’s church in Sudbury on 16 September 1610, and they had two other children, Peter and Rachel, the daughter born about 1615. Peter Brackett had died by about 1618, when Rachel is said to have married secondly Martin Sanders. She sailed for New England with her second family in 1635 and died at Braintree, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on 15 September 1651.

The family

All three of Peter and Rachel’s children settled in New England. Their daughter, Rachel, born about 1615, married Francis Newcomb and crossed with him and their two small children on the Planter in 1635, in the same party as her mother; seven more of the couple’s children were born at Braintree between 1640 and 1658. Their son Peter is said to have come to Braintree about 1636. On 7 March 1643/4 the colony’s General Court recorded that “Peter Bracket is allowed clerk of the writs at Braintree”. A study of his family published in 2001 credits him with eleven children by two, perhaps three, wives. His brother Richard later kept the town’s book of births, marriages and deaths, from about 1650 to 1654.

Notes

What is known of him

Peter Brackett is known only through his children. Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, volume 1, pp. 205–206, gives Richard Brackett’s baptism at St Gregory’s, Sudbury, on 16 September 1610 as the son of Peter Brackett, citing an article in The American Genealogist (volume 52, p. 73), and adds the mother’s name, Rachel, which the baptism entry does not state. The same account names Peter Brackett of Braintree and Rachel, the wife of Francis Newcomb, as the couple’s other children, and dates Rachel’s second marriage, to Martin Sanders, about 1618; that marriage is the only measure of when Peter died. No dates of his own birth, marriage or death are known.

The children

The Planter licence of 6 April 1635, printed in John Camden Hotten, The Original Lists of Persons of Quality (1874), pp. 47–48, lists Francis Newcom, aged 30, with “Rachell Newcom 20” and their children Rachel, aged two and a half, and John, nine months, in the same party as Martin Saunders and his wife Rachel. The Braintree town register, printed in Samuel A. Bates, ed., Records of the Town of Braintree 1640 to 1793 (1886), enters the births of Mary, Sarah, Judith, Peter, Abigail, Leah and Elizabeth, each as a child of “ffrancis Nucome and Rachell his wiffe”. Anderson (as above, p. 206) identifies Rachel Newcomb as the sister of Richard and Peter Brackett and has Peter come to Braintree about 1636. The General Court’s order of 7 March 1643/4 (Records of the Massachusetts Bay, volume 2, p. 57) is quoted in Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter (2001); the count of Peter’s children is from Gale Ion Harris, “Peter Brackett of Braintree and Boston”, The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 155 (2001), pp. 279–294, as summarized in the same newsletter.