♂Rodulphus Elmes

Rodulphus Elmes (about 1620 – 19 March 1711/12) was a man of Scituate in Plymouth Colony^W, the father of nine children entered in the town’s register of births between 1645 and 1668. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Rodolphus Elmes (born 1668).

Early life

He was baptized at Rotherfield Greys, Oxfordshire, on 27 August 1620, the son of John Elmes; his mother was most likely John’s wife, Sarah Chelsham. In April 1635, aged fifteen, he was licensed at London to sail for New England in the Planter.

His mother remembered him eighteen years after he sailed. By 1653 she was a widow in the parish of St Saviour, Southwark, and her will, dated 25 August 1653 and proved in 1654, left ten pounds to her “loving sonne” Rodulphus, “now in parts beyond the Seas”, if he should be living.

Family

The Scituate register enters each of his children as a child “of Rodulphus”: Sarah on 29 September 1645, Mary on 9 June 1648, Joanna on 28 March 1651, Hannah on 25 December 1653, John on 6 July 1655, Joseph on 26 March 1658, Waitestill on 9 February 1660, Jonathan on 27 September 1663, and last a son of his own name, entered as “Rodulphus, s. Rodulphus, May 27, 1668”. Joseph’s birth is given as 16 March in the Plymouth colony record. The entries do not name the children’s mother. A compiled genealogy (Savage, citing Deane’s History of Scituate) gives his wife as Catharine Whitcomb, daughter of John Whitcomb, and the marriage as 1644; no Scituate entry names her.

The youngest son, Rodolphus, married Bithiah Dodson at Scituate in 1696 and is called “Rodolphus Jr.” at the birth of his daughter Mary that year, which is what ties the two men together as father and son.

Notes

The Scituate register records the death of a Rodolphus Elmes on 19 March 1711/12 without saying whether it was the father or the son. The son died on 6 December 1749, so the entry is this man’s own death.

His parents

The Rotherfield Greys register enters his baptism as “Rodolphus fil: Joh: Elmes” and names no mother. His mother’s name, Sarah Chelsham, and the identification of the boy baptized there in 1620 with the settler of Scituate come from Robert Battle and Henry B. Hoff’s study of his English ancestry in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (2022). Sarah Elmes’s will, proved on 20 April 1654, names her “loving sonne Radolphus Elmes (now in parts beyond the Seas)”; the rare name, the 1620 baptism and the age of fifteen at the 1635 sailing agree.

The 1635 crossing

The entry comes from John Camden Hotten’s 1874 printed transcription of the London port lists, which gives his age as fifteen; that age is the basis for the birth date of about 1620.