♂Richard Hovey

Richard Hovey (buried 7 March 1636/7) was a glover of Waltham Holy Cross, also called Waltham Abbey, in Essex, England, whose youngest son, Daniel, settled at Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by three separate lines of descent, all through his son Daniel Hovey (1618–1692).

Life at Waltham

Richard Hovey’s family runs through the Waltham parish register for more than twenty years. It begins with a loss: his daughter Agnes was buried there on 13 April 1597. His son John was baptized on 10 June 1599, and the entry names the father as a glover. Between 1599 and 1618 nine children were baptized at Waltham, among them two sons named John, in 1599 and 1612, and the youngest, Daniel, was baptized on 9 August 1618. His wife’s name is not known.

Death

Richard Hovey was buried at Waltham on 7 March 1636/7, by the transcribed register, which again calls him a glover. He was probably in his early sixties.

His youngest son did not stay in England. By June 1638 Daniel was living at Ipswich, in New England. A family history published in 1913 prints what he wrote in a book that the minister of Waltham sent him there as a token: that he had been born at Waltham Abbey in August 1618, “Son of Richard Hovey of y same town”. That inscription is what joins the Ipswich planter to the Waltham glover.

Lines of descent

Richard Hovey stands twelve generations above Nancy Jane Blanchard, by three separate lines, all through his son Daniel Hovey (1618–1692). The lines meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from him, and once more in Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975), Nancy Jane Blanchard’s father, whose parents, Wesley’s son George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Anna Walker Merryman (1869–1942), were both descended from him too.

Notes

The Waltham register

Daniel’s baptism, “Daniell Hovey sonne to Richard Hovey”, on 9 August 1618, is on the Waltham Abbey register itself. The other children’s baptisms and burials, and Richard’s own burial, come from two independent transcriptions of the same register, FamilySearch’s index and the FreeREG transcript, and from a copy certified by the curate of Waltham in 1905 and printed in The Hovey Book (Daniel Hovey Association, 1913); they agree, though FamilySearch’s index lacks the baptisms of Isabel (1614/5) and Katharine (1616). The 1599 baptism of John calls the father a glover, and so does the burial entry of 1636/7.

Daniel’s book

The Hovey Book prints Daniel’s inscription from his copy of the poems of Du Bartas, printed at London in 1621, which passed by his will to his grandson. The deposition he gave at Ipswich in 1678, “aged sixty years”, places him in the town at the time of the earthquake of June 1638.

Age and marriage

The Hovey Book has him dying “probably at about the age of sixty-one or sixty-two”, which would place his birth about 1575; no baptism of his is known. The Waltham register holds no marriage of his (its only Hovey marriages are those of 1634 and 1637), so he most likely married elsewhere before his daughter Agnes was buried in 1597. A “Widow Hovey the elder” buried at Waltham on 29 August 1653 may have been his widow, but the entry gives no name.