♂Richard Treat

Richard Treat (baptized 9 January 1622/3 – about 1693) was a landholder of Wethersfield, in the Connecticut Colony^W, and the eldest son of the settler Richard Treat. He was a brother of Honor Treat (1616–1690), the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), and a son of Richard Treat and Alice Gaylard. He appears in the records as “Richard Treat Jr.” while his father, who sat in the colony’s upper house, was still living.

Early life

The Treat family genealogy of 1893 lists him among the children of Richard Treat born and baptized at Pitminster, in Somerset, England, and gives his baptism as 9 January 1622/3. The double year is the old reckoning, under which the English year began on 25 March^W. The same book gives his death as about 1693. The family moved to Wethersfield, where his father was established by 1641.

Wethersfield

His father’s will, dated 13 February 1668/69, calls him the eldest son. It gives him the farm of Nayog and three of the youngest heifers, and provides that the two best cows left to his mother for her lifetime should afterwards be his. It places the dwelling house left to her beside “his son Richards howse & lotte”, which shows that he had a house and lot of his own beside his parents’ by then. He was named, with his brother-in-law John Deming and Robert Webster, an overseer of the will, to help his mother.

In the digest of Connecticut probate records, the will of John Hollister of Wethersfield, proved on 1 June 1665, names “Richard Treat Jr.” as one of four overseers, and leaves land to one of Hollister’s sons, a swamp with six acres of meadow, “bought of Richard Treat, Jr.”. The will names Hollister’s wife as Joane. His father’s will speaks of a “daughter Hollister” and the Treat genealogy makes her his sister Joanna, though the will does not say so. A distribution of the estate of John Colfax, dated 1680 or 1681, is signed by a Richard Treat, with two other men. His father was dead by then, and it is most likely this Richard.

Family and death

Nathaniel Goodwin’s Genealogical Notes (1856) gives his wife as Sarah Coleman, a daughter of Thomas Coleman, one of the first settlers of Wethersfield, later of Hatfield, Massachusetts, whom he married about 1661; the Treat genealogy gives the same date. Goodwin lists four children, Richard, Sarah, Mary and Thomas, and calls him “Richard Treat, Esq.”, leaving the date of his death blank. Sarah died on 23 August 1734, at Rocky Hill in Wethersfield, in the house of her son-in-law Ephraim Goodrich. The date of about 1693 for his death rests on the Treat genealogy alone; no will or inventory of his estate has been found.

Notes

The name Richard Treat covers at least three men in the Wethersfield records: this man, his father, and a son of his own born in 1662. Records of a Richard Treat serving as a magistrate, or taking inventories in the 1650s and early 1660s, most likely belong to the father unless the record says “Jr.”.

The index to the Connecticut Superior Court’s papers records that in 1714 Dorothy Treat of Glastonbury petitioned in a dispute with Richard Goodrich, who had shown a “deed from Richard Treat” as his title. The court found the deed valid “as given at time of Gov. Andros”, which was the years 1687 to 1689 under the Dominion of New England^W. Richard Treat senior was then dead, and Goodwin names a Dorothy as the widow of Richard’s son Thomas of Glastonbury. The deed is therefore most likely this Richard’s, though the index does not say so.