♂Richard Treat

Richard Treat (died between February 1668/69 and March 1669/70) was a settler of Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony^W, who had earlier lived at Pitminster, in Somerset, England, and whom the histories of the town and colony place among the colony’s magistrates from 1658 to 1665. His will left “my great bible” to his daughter Honour Deming and “my little bible” to his youngest son, James. The family tree makes him the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Honor Treat (1616–1690). The line runs on through Honor’s daughter Mercy Deming (1651–1714), whose place in the family rests on later genealogies and has not been confirmed.

Pitminster

He was baptized at Pitminster on 28 August 1584, the son of Robert Trott, whose wife was Honora; The Treat Family (1893) prints the register entry, which spells the family name Trott. He was the youngest of six children baptized there as “of Robart trott”: Alice in 1564, John in 1570, Mary in 1575, Agnes in 1577 and Tamsen in 1581. John married Edith Priest in 1598, Mary married Robert Babb, a widower, in 1597, and Agnes married John Aplin in 1598. His father was buried at Pitminster on 16 February 1599. In 1600 the Taunton Manor registers, as The Treat Family quotes them, record Richard taking over the family land at Poundisford while his mother Honora held it as his father’s widow. She was buried at Pitminster on 17 September 1627.

On 27 April 1615 he married Alice Gaylard at Pitminster. The parish register spells the bride’s surname Gaylard, and its index reads the groom as “Richard Trett”; a separate index of the same register gives the date as 26 April and the name as “Richard Trott”. The same register records the baptism of a daughter of “Richard Trat” on 19 March 1615, indexed as Honor. At that time the English year began on 25 March, the reckoning now called Old Style^W, so the date falls at the very end of the year 1615/16, eleven months after the wedding. A daughter Joan was baptized there in 1618. The Treat Family (1893) lists ten children of Richard Treat, with their baptisms at Pitminster.

Wethersfield

By 1641 he was at Wethersfield. Henry Stiles’s history of the town, working from its land records, shows him buying several house lots there in 1641, and lists a farm of 120 acres at “Noyake”, on the east side of the Connecticut River, recorded to “Richard Treat, Senior” on the 28th day of the ninth month of 1641. His will later calls it “the farm of Nayog”.

Stiles lists “Richard Treat, Sen.” among the men from Wethersfield who sat in the upper house of the colony’s General Court^W, its magistrates, known as Assistants after the charter of 1662, from 1658 to 1665. Savage’s dictionary of the first settlers of New England gives him the same years as an Assistant and says that he was named in the royal charter of 23 April 1662, which joined the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven; Stiles also calls him a grantee of the charter.

On 5 December 1661 the court set a boy, Joseph Gennings, as an apprentice “to Richard Treat sen.” for ten years, at the end of which the boy was “to be paid £10 and well apparrelled”.

Nathaniel Goodwin’s Genealogical Notes (1856) prints, beside his name, a certificate signed “Richard Treate” at Wethersfield on 30 May 1664, by which Anthony Elcock, master of a vessel called The Beginning, bound for New Haven but “miscarrying in the matter, doth protest against the seas as being the cause”. The certificate does not say which Richard Treat signed it; his eldest son, also Richard, was then living in the town.

Will and death

His will, dated 13 February 1668/69, is that of “Mr Richard Treatt Senior of Wethersfield in the Collonie of Cannecticott”. To “my loving wife Alis Treat” he left, after his decease, all his lands within the bounds of Wethersfield, the dwelling house he had formerly lived in, the use of two of his best cows of her choosing, the standing bed and its furniture, and the use of as much of the household goods as she judged needful for her comfort. His eldest son, Richard, received the farm of Nayog and three heifers; his second son, Robert, ten pounds; and his youngest son, James, besides lands already made over to him, “my mill and grinding stone”, with timber, chains, steelyards and “my little bible”. A son-in-law, Matthew Camfield, received twenty pounds “for that which is remaining of his portion”, his daughter Hollister forty shillings and his daughter Johnson ten shillings.

The rest of his goods went equally to his sons-in-law John Deming and Robert Webster, except “Mr Perkins Booke”, which went to “my sonn John Deming”, and the great bible, which went to Honour. Money in the hands of “my Cousen Samuell Wells” went to “my Cousen David Deming son of John Deming senior”: in the language of the time “cousin” could mean any kinsman, and here it meant a grandson. He asked John Deming, Robert Webster and his son Richard to act as overseers, “for their mutual helpfulness to my loving wife”.

The will was exhibited in court on 3 March 1669/70 and approved with the inventory, which came to £69 10s 8d and was taken by John Deming, Robert Webster and John Nott. He therefore died between 13 February 1668/69 and 3 March 1669/70. The day of his death is not recorded. The folded outside of the will, docketed later by an archivist, reads “1670”, the modern form of the court’s year.

Notes

Goodwin names his wife as Joan, and Savage, repeating a report that he brought a wife Joanna from England, supposed that the widow Alice was a second wife and not the mother of his children. The Pitminster register records his marriage to Alice Gaylard in April 1615, eleven months before the baptism of his first daughter. The family tree takes her to be the “Alis” of the will, fifty-three years later.

Savage notes that the colony’s printed records give the name as Richard Trott far more often than Richard Treat, and he took the Richard Trott who served on the grand jury in 1643 and as a deputy every year from 1644 to 1658 to be this man.

Standard histories identify his son Robert with Robert Treat, later governor of Connecticut^W. The will calls him only “my second sonne Robert Treat” and does not make that identification.