♂Robert Hinckley

Robert Hinckley (buried 27 March 1606) was a landholder of Harrietsham, in Kent, England, who raised two families there and, in the last year of his life, divided his house, land and money among the sons of both. He was probably the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Samuel Hinckley (died 1662). Samuel took his own family to New England in 1635, and his son Thomas Hinckley^W became the last governor of Plymouth Colony^W.

Early life

Robert was the son of John Hinckley of Harrietsham, who was buried there on 25 June 1577. In his father’s will of 5 May 1577 Robert is named as “my son Roberte”, and he was then living in his father’s chief house at Harrietsham, which the will left him for life.

Family

Robert’s first wife, Elizabeth, was the mother of his children Thomas, Clemen and Isaac, born in the 1560s and early 1570s. She was buried at Harrietsham on 2 November 1574. More children followed between 1576 and about 1591: Stephen, Margaret, Elizabeth, Catherine, Mary, Samuel and John. Samuel was baptized at Harrietsham on 25 May 1589. The first Stephen was buried as an infant in April 1577, and Robert later gave the name to another son, the Stephen who would inherit the house. Margaret died in 1598, at seventeen, before the will was made.

Will and death

Robert made his will on 6 April 1605, written “Robert Hynckley of Harritesham”. To Stephen he left a messuage^W, a barn and 33 acres in Harrietsham, with all his goods, and he named him executor. The younger sons had money instead of land, paid out of Stephen’s inheritance: Samuel was to have £30 within a year of his father’s death, and John, still under age, £20 when he reached twenty-two. His daughters Catherine, Elizabeth and Mary each had a bequest, and Elizabeth’s daughter Cicelye was remembered with her mother. That October he added a codicil, leaving the rest of his lands to “Thomas Hinckley and Isaacke Hinckley two other of my sons”, the sons of his first marriage. Robert was buried at Harrietsham on 27 March 1606, and Stephen proved the will on 8 May 1607.

Notes

His father

The will of John Hinckley of Harrietsham, written “John Hynckleye” in the will itself, is dated 5 May 1577 and was proved at Lenham on 11 October 1577. French’s abstract of it is printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 65, pages 287–288; the Archdeaconry of Canterbury copy is volume 43, folio 30. The will names “my son Roberte Hyncklye” and leaves “my chief messuage at Haryetsham, wherein Robert my son now dwelleth” to him for life, then to “Isaacke Hyncklye and Thomas Hyncklye”, and it makes Robert executor. The identity rests on those grandsons: Thomas and Isaac are the sons of Robert in the Harrietsham register. The Harrietsham register records the burial of John Hinckley senior on 25 June 1577.

Father of the emigrant

The Harrietsham register records the baptism of “Samvell filius Roberti hinckley” (Samuel, son of Robert Hinckley) on 25 May 1589, and Robert’s will leaves £30 to “son Samuell Hynckley”. Elizabeth French, writing in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1911 (volume 65, pages 314–318), identified this Samuel with the Samuel Hinckley of Tenterden who sailed for New England in 1635 and settled at Scituate and Barnstable. Neither the baptism nor the will follows Samuel to Tenterden, so the link is her identification rather than a record, and the same register records other Hinckley households: that of John Hinckley, who married Johane Bills in 1553, and that of Henry Hinckley, whose children are recorded from 1588 to 1600. Two later notes support the identification. In 1914 she gave the John Hinckley of Hawkhurst, whose children were baptized from 1622, as probably Samuel’s brother John (volume 68, page 186). In 1925 Bartlett identified the “kinswoman” Elizabeth who sailed with Samuel’s family in the Hercules as the daughter of Samuel’s brother Stephen Hincle of Milton (volume 79, page 108), and French’s pedigree makes that Stephen the executor of Robert’s will. The baptism of 1589 names no mother.

The will and the register

The will, the codicil of 2 October 1605 and the probate of 8 May 1607 are known from French’s abstract of the copy in the registers of the Archdeaconry of Canterbury (volume 53, folio 358), printed in volume 65, page 288. The burial (“Robert Hinckley buried 27 March”) and the baptisms and burials of his children come from her extracts of the Harrietsham parish register in the same volume.