♂Richard Brackett

Richard Brackett (baptized 16 September 1610 – 3 March 1689/90) was a husbandman from Sudbury in Suffolk, England, who came to Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W by 1632 and spent the rest of his long life at Braintree as its deacon, its town clerk, its deputy to the colony’s court and the captain of its militia. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), most likely through his daughter Hannah (died 1706).

Boston

Richard was baptized at St Gregory’s church in Sudbury on 16 September 1610. He had crossed to New England by 1632, and shortly before 11 November that year he was admitted to the Boston church as its 144th member. In 1633 he sailed back to England to marry. On 6 January 1633/4 Richard Brackett and Alice Blower were married at St Katherine by the Tower^W, in London. By the end of 1634 they were living in Boston, where their first child, Hannah, was baptized on 4 January 1634/5.

He was made a freeman^W of the colony on 25 May 1636, and from 1637 to 1640 he was the keeper of the Boston jail. In 1639 he joined the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company^W. In February 1639/40 the Boston selectmen gave “our brother Richard Brackett” leave to mow the marsh in the New Field, “which he hath usually mown”, for one more summer.

Braintree

On 5 December 1641 the Boston church recommended Richard and Alice to the church at Braintree, and on 8 May 1642 it dismissed him there “at their desire of him unto the Office of a Deacon amongst them”. Braintree was their home for the rest of their lives. From about 1650 to 1654 he was the town’s clerk, keeping its book of births, marriages and deaths in succession to Henry Adams; the book records the birth of his own son Josiah on 8 May 1652. He served as a selectman in 1652, 1653, 1670, 1672 and 1683. In 1652 he sat on the board beside Martin Sanders, who is said to have married his mother, Rachel, about 1618 and had come over with his family in 1635.

Braintree sent him to the General Court^W as its deputy nine times between 1655 and 1681. In 1679 the court empowered him “to join persons in marriage in the town of Braintry”, and the town’s register records couples married by Captain Richard Brackett in 1681, 1682 and 1684. He held the town’s chief military command into old age: on 15 October 1684 the court granted the request of “Capt[ain] Richard Brackett, being above seventy-three years of age, & infirmities of age upon him”, to lay it down.

Family

Richard and Alice had eight children: four baptized at Boston between 1635 and 1639 (Hannah, then Peter and John on the same day, then Rachel) and four born at Braintree (Mary, James, Josiah and Sarah). Their eldest, Hannah, is most likely the Hannah who married Samuel Kingsley and, after his death in 1662, John Blanchard; Richard’s will gives “my daughter Hannah Blancher twenty shillings in good pay”.

Through his mother and his wife, Richard belonged to a wide web of related families. A study of the Great Migration^W counts more than forty future immigrants to New England who were related to him by blood or marriage before they left England, and names him as the first of them to come.

Death and will

Richard made his will on 29 January 1688/9, signing it in a shaky hand. He left Alice the use for life of his whole estate in Braintree and the income from his lands at Billerica, together with the rest of his movable goods. His house, barn, orchards, lands and meadows at Braintree went to his son James, the Billerica lands were shared among the families of his children, and his “great Bible” went to his daughter Rachel Crosby for her lifetime. Richard died at Braintree on 3 March 1689/90, aged 80, and Alice died there on 3 November 1690, aged 76; his will was proved at Boston on 19 December 1690.

Notes

Sources

His church membership, offices and Boston grants, the court’s words of 1679 and 1684, and the abstract of his will are from Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins, volume 1, pp. 203–206, which cites the Boston church records, the records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Boston town records and the will itself (Suffolk Probate 8:9). The town register’s list of its keepers (“At first kept by Henry Addams. Then by Capt. Richard Brackett.”), the birth of “Josia Brackett, the sone of Richard Brackett and Allis his wiffe” on “the 8th of the 3d mo. 1652”, the marriages he performed, and both deaths are printed in Samuel A. Bates, ed., Records of the Town of Braintree 1640 to 1793 (1886). The register enters his death as “Captayne Richard Brackett died upon the 3d of March 1690 aged 80”. The will in the Suffolk probate register is dated 29 January 1688/9 and was proved at Boston on 19 December 1690.

Baptism and parents

The baptism at St Gregory’s, Sudbury, is given by Anderson from an article in The American Genealogist (volume 52, p. 73), which names his father as Peter Brackett; Anderson adds the mother, Rachel. By the same account a brother, Peter Brackett, came to Braintree about 1636, and Rachel married secondly Martin Sanders about 1618; Sanders, his wife and their children sailed for New England in 1635 on the Planter. The age of 80 at his death in March 1689/90 fits a baptism in September 1610.

His daughter Hannah

The will names “my daughter Hannah Blancher” but does not call her the widow of Samuel Kingsley. Anderson, and Ezra S. Stearns in his account of the early families of Dunstable (1911), identify her as Hannah, baptized at Boston on 4 January 1634/5, who married first Samuel Kingsley (died 1662) and, by 1665, Deacon John Blanchard. Hazen’s History of Billerica (1883) states that Samuel Kingsley “m. Hannah Bracket, dau. of Richard, of Braintree”, and Savage writes that Kingsley’s widow and her father administered his estate. That administration, in the Middlesex County probate files, is the record that would join the two names directly.

The kinship network

Anderson credits the work on this network chiefly to Mary Lovering Holman, John Brooks Threlfall and Douglas Richardson, and calls it the largest yet uncovered among the participants in the Great Migration.

The clerks of the writs

On 7 March 1643/4 the General Court allowed Peter Brackett clerk of the writs at Braintree (Records of the Massachusetts Bay, volume 2, p. 57). On 4 November 1646 the court appointed Henry Adams clerk of the writs “in the room of Peter Bracket” (volume 2, p. 165). Adams entered the town’s earliest vital records until he removed to Medfield in 1650. The entries from about 1650 to 1654 are attributed to Richard Brackett, and John Mills took the book over in 1654. Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter (2001) gives the court orders and this sequence, and the Braintree register’s own list of its keepers names Henry Adams first and Richard Brackett next.