♂Robert Treat

Robert Treat (about 1622 – 12 July 1710) was a colonist of Milford, in the Connecticut Colony^W, whom nineteenth-century histories identify as the second son of Richard Treat of Wethersfield and as the military commander and later governor of the colony. 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.

Milford and the colony

Goodwin gives his birth as 1621, and his death on 12 July 1710 “in his 89th year”, citing the monument in the Milford burying ground; the age on the monument points to about 1622. The Treat family genealogy of 1893 instead gives his baptism at Pitminster, Somerset, on 25 February 1624/25, which would make the monument’s age two or three years too high; the two have not been reconciled. He married Jane Tapp, only daughter of Edmund Tapp, one of the first settlers of Milford, who died on 8 April 1703; he married secondly Elizabeth Bryan, a widow. Goodwin lists eight children, among them Samuel, a Harvard graduate of 1669 who became minister at Eastham, Massachusetts, and whose daughter was the mother of Robert Treat Paine, a signer of the Declaration of Independence; Hannah, who married the Reverend Samuel Mather of Windsor; and a daughter who married the Reverend Samuel Andrew of Milford, later rector of Yale College.

Stiles records him as a major in the colony’s militia in the war of 1675–76 against the New England Indians, King Philip’s War^W. In September 1675 he was ordered to detail dragoons to patrol the river towns, and in November he was to command a force of 110 men raised from them. At the assault on the Narragansett fort on 19 December 1675, the Great Swamp Fight^W, Stiles has him commanding the Connecticut troops and second in command of the united colonies’ forces under Josiah Winslow. Goodwin prints the minutes of a meeting of the colony’s Council at Hartford on 14 September 1676 at which “Major Robert Treat” was present.

By February 1685/86 he was governor: Stiles prints the grant of a town patent to Wethersfield, dated 17 February 1685/86, “signed by Robert Treat, Governor”, under the colony’s charter of 1662. Goodwin describes him as “Lieut. Governor, afterwards Governor of the colony of Connecticut”.

Notes

The will and the identification

The one record that names him as a son is his father’s will, dated 13 February 1668/69, which leaves “my second sonne Robert Treat” ten pounds; his elder brother Richard received the farm of Nayog and his youngest brother, James, the mill. The will gives no place of residence for him and says nothing of a governor. That the Robert of the will was Robert Treat of Milford rests on compiled histories. Nathaniel Goodwin’s Genealogical Notes (1856) prints the will with bracketed notes of its own beside the name: “He settled in Milford. He married Jane Tapp, of Milford.” Henry Stiles’s History of Ancient Wethersfield calls “Major Robert Treat (afterwards Governor), of Milford, son of Richard Treat of Wethersfield”. No court, land or probate record found makes the link; it is followed here on the authority of those histories.