♂Samuel Brocklebank

Samuel Brocklebank (died 1676) was a deacon and militia captain of Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts, who died in King Philip’s War^W in April 1676, leaving a widow and seven children, the youngest a boy of one. He was most likely the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Hannah Brocklebank (born 1659).

Rowley

Where Samuel came from is not recorded. A dictionary of New England’s first settlers published in 1860–62 repeats a tradition that he came over with his mother, Jane, and his brother John, and gives his age at death as 48, which would place his birth about 1628.

Samuel Brocklebank and Hannah were married at Rowley on 18 May 1652; the town’s printed records list the marriage among the entries whose surname is missing, so her maiden name is not known. Between 1653 and 1674 the town recorded the births of their children Samuel, Francis, Hannah, two daughters named Sarah, Jane and Joseph. Two more daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, have no birth entry in the town’s records, but the court named them among the children in 1676. Not all of the children lived: in July 1660 two sons, John and Francis, were buried within three weeks of each other, and the first Sarah died in March 1667, a few months after her birth.

A trusted townsman

The town relied on him for its land and its paperwork. Transcripts printed in a Stickney family genealogy of 1869 show a town meeting choosing him in November 1662, with William Stickney and three others, to lay out lots, and Samuel witnessing two of Stickney’s deeds that year. When William Stickney made his will in January 1664, he named “my trusty friends Maxemillion Jewett and Samuell Brocklebanke” as its overseers, and in March 1665 Samuel swore to the will in court at Ipswich and helped to value the estate. Over the same years Samuel rose in the town’s records from lieutenant to captain, as he was by 1674, and the church recorded him as a deacon.

King Philip’s War

By the account of the 1869 genealogy, on 29 November 1675, early in the war, Captain Brocklebank pressed twelve Rowley men into service, among them William Stickney’s son John. By April 1676 he was keeping his quarters at Marlborough, on the colony’s western frontier. When word came that Sudbury had been attacked, Captain Wadsworth of Milton marched from Marlborough to its relief, and Brocklebank went with him, wrote Daniel Gookin^W, the colony magistrate who left the fullest early account of the fight, hoping to use the march as a safe escort to Boston, where he meant to speak with the council. The men marched through the night and, tired out, fell into an ambush; most of them were cut off.

The next morning a company of praying Indians^W sent to relieve Sudbury crossed the river and found the dead. Some of them wept at the sight, and among the slain they recognized, in Gookin’s words, “those two worthy and pious Captains, Capt. Broklebank of Rowley and Capt. Wadsworth of Milton”.

Rowley’s own records date his death two ways. The church record has “Samuel, Dea., Apr. 18, 1676”. A gravestone set up in 1752 for one of his granddaughters calls him “Capt. Samuel Brocklebank, who was slain by the Indians at Sudbury, Apr. 21, 1676”, the day on which Gookin and the diarist Samuel Sewall place the fight. By Gookin’s account and the gravestone, he was killed with Captain Wadsworth’s company in the Sudbury Fight^W.

The Stickney genealogy places John Stickney in the same fight. On 9 June 1680 he married the captain’s daughter Hannah at Rowley.

The estate

His widow, Hannah, took charge of what he left as its administratrix. On 26 September 1676 she attested the inventory in the county court at Ipswich. Three neighbors had valued the estate, among them Maximilian Jewett, his fellow overseer of William Stickney’s will: the house and homestead with its kiln, barn and nine-acre lot, a farm towards Bradford worth £150, lots of upland and salt marsh about the town, oxen, cows, horses, sheep and hogs, beds, brass and pewter, two guns and a few books, £442 11s in all. Among the sums still owed to the estate was £4 3s “for Country service”.

The same day the court ordered the distribution: £80 to the eldest son, Samuel, and £40 to each of the six other children, Joseph, Hannah, Elizabeth, Mary, Sarah and Jane, as they came of age or married, Joseph’s portion to be paid in land. The rest went to the widow, and all the lands were bound for the payment of the portions.

Twenty-five years later, on 9 October 1701, the “children of Capt. Samuel Brocklebank and Hanah his wife late of Rowley, deceased” agreed on the division of the estate their parents had left. Samuel, “the eldest son”, took the farm about five miles from the meeting house on which he was already living. Joseph, “the youngest son”, took the house and the land beside it, with twenty-eight acres in the west end ox pasture, though the house lots were to return “to the five sisters or to their children” if he did not live to need them for his maintenance or left no child. The daughters’ shares went through their husbands, John Stickney, William Dole, John Tod, Nathaniel Coffin and Abiel Somerby, who all signed with Samuel, Joseph and two of the sisters, Sarah Coffin and Jane Somerby. The court allowed the agreement on 13 October 1702.

A deed printed in the Stickney genealogy shows that in May 1701, a few months before the agreement, John Stickney and William Dole, with their wives Hannah and Mary, had sold land laid out to “Capt. Sam’l Brocklebanke our father-in-law” that had come to the wives as part of their portion.

Notes

The marriage, the children’s births and burials, and the church’s record of Samuel’s death are from the printed Vital Records of Rowley, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (1928–31). Rowley then counted its months from March, so the marriage entry “18: 3m: 1652” is 18 May 1652, and the first Sarah’s burial, entered “1: 1m: 1666”, fell in March 1667 by the modern year. The date of Jane’s birth is illegible in the printed copy. The same records show that the deacon, the lieutenant and the captain are one man: Jane’s father is entered “Lt.” in the town copy and “Dea.” in the church copy, and Joseph’s parents in 1674 are “Capt. Samuel and Hanah”. The only other Samuel Brocklebank of the time, his son, married Elizabeth Platts in 1681. Elizabeth’s marriage to John Tod at Rowley on 14 March 1685 is also in the town’s records.

The date of his death differs. The Rowley church entered “Samuel, Dea.” under 18 April 1676, the date some early histories also gave. Gookin’s account and the diary of Samuel Sewall, which notes under 21 April that “Capt. Wadsworth and Capt. Brocklebank fall”, place the fight on Friday 21 April; both are printed in an article on the Wadsworth monument in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for 1853. A granddaughter’s gravestone of 1752 in Georgetown, printed in the Rowley records, also calls him “slain by the Indians at Sudbury, Apr. 21, 1676”. Because the two dates disagree, only the year is given.

The inventory, the court’s order of distribution and the heirs’ agreement of 1701 are printed from the county’s probate files in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. III (1675–1681), pp. 91–93; the court’s date “26: 7: 1676” is 26 September 1676 by the same count of months. The 1869 Stickney genealogy dates an agreement among the heirs, signed by John Stickney, to 17 June 1691; the agreement in the probate file is dated 9 October 1701. Whether the book’s date refers to the same document is not known.

The dictionary is James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England; it gives no source for the tradition of his arrival. The 1869 book is Matthew Adams Stickney’s The Stickney Family; its texts of the town votes, deeds, will and 1701 deed are transcripts, not the originals. George Thomas Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine (1909) gives the same account of the impressment and of Sudbury.