♂Richard Fowle

Richard Fowle (christened 18 December 1569 – buried 2 March 1631/32) was a yeoman of Frittenden and Headcorn, in Kent, England, whose daughter Joan married Richard Borden, one of the first planters of Portsmouth, Rhode Island. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through his daughter Joan Fowle (1604–1688).

Early life

Richard was christened at Frittenden on 18 December 1569, a son of Thomas Fowle of Frittenden, who served as churchwarden in 1573. His mother was most likely Thomas’s second wife, Joane, who was buried at Frittenden on 21 May 1570, when Richard was five months old. His father married a third time, and Richard grew up with a stepmother, Margery, and six younger half-brothers and half-sisters. Margery was buried in January 1584/5, when he was fifteen. By his will of 1587 his father left Richard lands in Frittenden and Marden, and Thomas Fowle was buried at Frittenden on 25 August 1592.

Marriages and children

Richard seems to have married first a wife whose name is not known, and their son Richard was christened at Frittenden on 1 August 1601. A month later, on 3 September 1601, a licence was issued at Canterbury for Richard Fowle of Frittenden, yeoman, to marry Mary Filkes, a widow of the same parish, at St Margaret’s church in Canterbury; Thomas Harvie, a Canterbury shoemaker, stood bond. Mary had a daughter by her first marriage, also named Mary Filkes, who married Richard Stanyerd at Headcorn on 8 September 1623; Richard remembered her in his will as his “daughter-in-law”, in the old sense of stepdaughter, Mary Stannard.

Richard and Mary had three daughters: Joan, born about 1604, Elizabeth, christened at Headcorn on 12 March 1608/9, and Jane, christened there on 5 July 1612. Headcorn remained the family’s parish. Joan married Richard Borden at Headcorn on 28 September 1625, and Mary was buried there on 1 August 1627.

Later years

By the end of 1630 Elizabeth had married Robert Joseph of Dartford, and Jane later married John Babson. Richard made his will in 1630, describing himself as a yeoman of Frittenden and Headcorn, and he was buried at Headcorn on 2 March 1631/32. Some six years later his daughter Joan and her husband crossed with their children to New England, and by 1638 they were settled at Portsmouth.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through Richard and Mary’s daughter Joan Fowle and her daughter Mary Borden, who married John Cook. They divide among the children of Mary Borden’s granddaughter Ruth Cook, and meet again in Salena Sherman (1806–1842), whose parents Waite Allen (1766–1850) and Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) both descended from Richard and Mary.

Notes

Sources

His christening and burial, his parents, his marriages, his children’s christenings and the wills of father and son are from G. Andrews Moriarty’s account of the family, “Fowle-Borden”, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 75 (1921), pp. 226–233, built from the Frittenden and Headcorn parish registers, Kent wills and the lay subsidy rolls. The marriage licence of 1601 is printed in Joseph Meadows Cowper’s Canterbury Marriage Licences, first series. The stepdaughter’s marriage at Headcorn in 1623 is from an index of the Kent parish registers. Moriarty prints no baptism for Joan; her birth year of 1604 comes from the Rhode Island genealogies of the Borden family.

His first marriage

Moriarty writes that Richard “seems to have married first”, and gives the son Richard christened at Frittenden on 1 August 1601 to that first wife. Her name and the date of her death are not known.

A son Thomas?

An index of the Headcorn register has a Thomas Fowle, son of Richard, christened there on 1 August 1615. Moriarty does not list him, and it is not known whether he was a son of this Richard and Mary.

Dates

Years written 1608/9 or 1631/32 are Old Style^W dates, when the year began on 25 March.