♂Rawkey Dolbiar

Rawkey Dolbiar (baptized 17 August 1571 – buried 12 November 1641) was a parishioner of Colyton in Devon, England, and the husband of Mary Michell. In March 1634 their daughter Mary married Jonathan Gillett, a settler back from New England, and crossed the Atlantic with him that year. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through that daughter, Mary Dolbiar (died 1686).

Life at Cadhayne

He was baptized at Colyton on 17 August 1571, a son of Robert, a yeoman of Cadhayne who was one of the parish’s churchwardens in 1579. A compiled genealogy also gives him as a yeoman of the hamlet of Cadhayne in the parish of Colyton. On 10 October 1602 he married Mary Michell at Colyton. She was the daughter of John Michell of Barretshayes, another hamlet of the parish, though her family had been living at Cadhayne when she was baptized in 1576.

Their daughter Joan was baptized at Colyton on 9 January 1602/3, and a compiled genealogy places the couple at Cadhayne at that time. In 1605, when their daughter Anne was baptized, the couple were living at Minchinholme, a farm close to Cadhayne where her father seems to have lived in the 1570s; by 1611 they were back at Cadhayne. Seven children were baptized at Colyton, the last, John, in April 1619; a compiled genealogy places the family at Cadhayne at his baptism. Three were buried young: Joan in 1606 at the age of three, Dorothy in 1614 before her first birthday, and Cornelius in 1621 at five.

Death

He was buried at Colyton on 12 November 1641. Mary lived on at Cadhayne as his widow and was buried at Colyton on 20 September 1648.

Notes

Sources

The couple are known from the parish register of Colyton, which A. J. P. Skinner transcribed and the Devon & Cornwall Record Society printed in 1928. John Insley Coddington gathered the Dolbiar and Michell entries into families in his article on Jonathan Gillett and Mary Dolbiar in The American Genealogist (April 1939), and the dates here are the ones he printed. He built the pedigree from the register alone: Colyton lay in the peculiar jurisdiction of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter, so the wills of its people are not in the printed calendar of Devon wills. The occupation of yeoman and the residences at the baptisms of 1602/3 and 1619 come from the same printed pedigree.

The baptism of 1605 names the father as “Rokie Dolber of Minchinholm”. Coddington made this the farm Mary Michell’s father had occupied, because a daughter of “John Mychell of Mynchenholme” was baptized in 1579.

His name

The register spells his first name Rawkey, Rockye, Rokey, Rokie, Rokye and Rochee, and his surname Dolber, Dolbere, Dolebeere and Dolbiar; his burial is entered as “Rokey Dolbiar”. Coddington called it “a most singular” Christian name and could only guess that it was a Devonshire form of the French name Roch^W.

His mother

The entry of his baptism names only his father. Robert had married a second wife, Agnes Sampson of Hawkchurch, at Colyton in 1563, eight years before Rawkey’s baptism, and Coddington counted him among her children.

Their daughter’s marriage

The register records the marriage of “Jonathan Gillett & Mary Dolbiar” on 29 March 1634. Coddington has the bride and groom sail for New England soon after the wedding, on the strength of a note in the Gillett family Bible, printed by Henry R. Stiles, in which one of Jonathan’s sons wrote that his father “came into new-inglan the secon[d] time in June in the yeare 1634”.