♂Peter Mills

Peter Mills (died 17 April 1710) was a tailor of Windsor, Connecticut. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Esther Mills.

Life

A family tradition, printed in a nineteenth-century history of Windsor, makes him a Dutchman, Peter van der Meulen, who took the English name Mills, and the son of a Dutch knight of Amsterdam. On this account he left his studies at Leyden to join the English religious refugees there, was disinherited for it, and changed his name in Connecticut. An earlier genealogist, James Savage, thought the story of little weight, and no record bears it out. The same history places his home on the eastern edge of what is now Bloomfield, near Windsor Plains, and records a lot held in his name at Haddam in 1669.

He married Dorcas Messenger, the daughter of Edward Messenger, born at Windsor in 1650; she died on 18 May 1688, and in December 1691 he married Jane Warren of Hartford. His children included Peter, Return (who died in 1689), Dorcas, Ebenezer, Pelatiah, and the daughters Esther, who married John Eggleston in 1682, and Mary, who married a Soper.

He died at Windsor on 17 April 1710 without a will. On 3 July 1710 the Hartford probate court granted administration of his estate to his son Peter, also a tailor.

Notes

Winthrop’s unpublished medical journal, in an entry for 23 January 1666/7, records a child Hester, one year old, as “daughter of Peter the Duchman” who “married Goodman Messingers daughter” (quoted in Ullmann, Descendants of Peter Mills of Windsor, Connecticut, p. 8). The journal’s Hester is Esther. It names the mother only as Goodman Messenger’s daughter; Dorcas Messenger, born at Windsor in 1650, was about fifteen at Esther’s birth. The will of their sister Dorcas leaves Windsor land “commonly called Messengers farm”, which ties that Dorcas to her mother’s Messenger family. The same will names Esther Eggleston and Mary Soper as her sisters, which is how Mary is known as Peter’s daughter.