♂Samuel Dudley

Samuel Dudley (baptized 30 November 1608 – 10 February 1683) was the minister of Exeter, New Hampshire, from 1650 until his death, and a farmer, mill owner and town officer there. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, through his son Stephen Dudley and his daughter Dorothy Dudley.

Early years

He was baptized at All Saints, Northampton, on 30 November 1608, as “Samuell”, son of Thomas Dudley, in an entry from the parish register that Henry F. Waters printed in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1893. A family history published in 1886 makes him the only son of Thomas Dudley^W, later governor of Massachusetts Bay, by his first wife, Dorothy, and says he was born about 1610 in Northamptonshire, England; the baptism entry gives the earlier date, and a genealogical dictionary published in 1860 had doubted the Northampton birthplace that was often given for him. His mother’s family name, which the 1886 history leaves blank, was Yorke. The will of Edmond Yorke of Cotton End, near Northampton, a yeoman, made on 18 November 1614 and printed in the same Register in 1893, names “my daughter Dudley”, without her forename, and three grandchildren, among them “Samuell Dudley”, to whom he left forty shillings and a silver spoon, to be delivered at the age of twenty-one; Thomas Dudley was one of the four overseers of the will. Both books say he came over with his father in 1630, and the family history names the ship as the Arbella^W. According to the family history, he and some other young men nearly came to be punished in 1632 for carousing aboard a vessel at Boston. The same book places him among the first settlers of Newtown, later Cambridge, in 1631, and says he went as lieutenant to Captain John Underhill to take Sir Christopher Gardiner^W, who stood accused of bigamy and other offenses. The 1860 dictionary gives him the rank of lieutenant in 1631 and dates his admission as a freeman to 7 October 1640.

First two marriages

Both books say he married Mary, a daughter of Governor John Winthrop^W, in 1632 or 1633. The family history gives them five children, of whom a daughter, Ann, born in 1641, married Edward Hilton of Exeter. Mary died at Salisbury in April 1643; the family history gives the 16th and the 1860 dictionary the 12th. About 1644 he married Mary Byley, whom the family history calls a sister of Henry Byley of Salisbury, a link the dictionary treats as Dean Dudley’s probable guess, and five more children followed. According to the family history, she died at Exeter about 1651.

Salisbury

The family history says he moved from Cambridge to Ipswich about 1635 and went on in 1638 to help settle Salisbury, where he lived about twelve years. It has him chosen deputy for Salisbury to the General Court^W at Boston in each year from 1641 to 1645, while the 1860 dictionary names only 1644. The same book says that in March 1648 he was appointed an associate judge to hold a yearly court at Salisbury.

Minister of Exeter

The agreement he made with the town of Exeter on 13 May 1650, printed from the town records in a history of Exeter published in 1888, bound him to come and live in the house the town had bought from John Wheelwright^W and to preach there until “the gathering of a church”, when he was to be ordained pastor or teacher; the town was to fit up the house and pay him forty pounds a year. The same history notes that on 20 April 1652 the town paid him twenty shillings for the use of his two bulls, and describes him as the keeper of the town books and the general conveyancer and attorney of the place. The family history dates to 1656 an offer from Portsmouth of eighty pounds a year to be its minister. Exeter’s answer, in the town records printed in 1888, was a vote of a town meeting on 8 June 1657 to pay him fifty pounds a year in “merchantable pine boards” and pipe staves, any shortfall to be made up in corn, and to confirm to him and his heirs forever the house and lands that had been Wheelwright’s. Staves had paid for his post from the start: an order of 22 April 1650, made in anticipation of his coming, charged two shillings on every thousand pipe staves made in the town for the upkeep of the ministry. The family history adds that in 1668 he swore to having seen the original Indian deed of the Exeter lands, and that on 30 March 1674 the town granted him six hundred acres for a farm, land later within Brentwood.

Third marriage and death

A family history published in 1886 says that within a year or so of Mary Byley’s death, about 1651, Samuel Dudley married a third wife, Elizabeth, whose surname it does not give, and that she bore him four sons and four daughters. By its count he had eighteen children by his three wives, several of the youngest still minors when he died, and of his ten sons only Stephen, a son of the third marriage, had descendants still carrying the Dudley name from him in 1886. He died at Exeter on 10 February 1683, aged seventy-three according to both histories; the 1860 dictionary gives the year as 1684. The family history says he left no will, that his son Theophilus administered the estate, and that the six hundred acres were divided among the children in twelfths. It records that his inventory listed seventeen books, and that his Bible and cane, kept by a descendant at Brentwood, were later given to the New Hampshire Historical Society.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through children of his third marriage. According to the published family history and genealogical dictionary, one runs through his son Stephen Dudley, by way of James and John Dudley to Nathaniel Dudley (1763–1844); the other runs through his daughter Dorothy, who married Moses Leavitt of Exeter on 26 October 1681, and whose son Stephen Leavitt was the father of Mary Leavitt, the mother of Anna Smith. Nathaniel Dudley and Anna Smith were therefore third cousins, both great-great-grandchildren of Samuel Dudley, and the two lines meet again in their marriage. Their daughter Sarah Dudley (1795–1839) was Nancy Jane Blanchard’s ancestor.