♂Samuel Kingsley

Samuel Kingsley (died 21 May 1662) was a colonist of Braintree in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, where his children’s births were recorded from 1656, and he died at Billerica less than three months before the birth of the son through whom his line continues. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son Samuel Kingsley (1662–1713).

Land and freedom

On 7 May 1651 Samuel Kingsley was admitted a freeman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the colony’s record for that day lists him beside Martin Saunders of Braintree. By 1658 he was most likely living at Billerica, and in August 1659 he received a ten-acre grant from the town. He also held a house lot of a hundred acres south of Fox Hill, and in 1661 he signed the town agreement.

Family

He married Hannah, whose surname is not given in the records of their children, by 1656. The town records of Braintree name five children of Samuel and Hannah Kingsley between 1656 and 1662: two daughters, Hannah and Elizabeth, born in 1656 and 1657; Mary and a first son named Samuel, who both died young, in 1659 and early 1661; and a second Samuel. A nineteenth-century dictionary of New England’s first settlers calls him “Samuel Kingsley of Billerica”.

Death

Samuel Kingsley died on 21 May 1662, by the Billerica vital records, where a duplicate entry gives 12 May. His son Samuel was born on 6 August 1662, less than three months after his father’s death, and the Braintree records enter the birth as that of the “son of Samuel & Hanna”.

The Braintree entries give his wife’s first name only. A compiled genealogy of the Great Migration identifies his widow as Hannah Brackett, baptized at Boston in January 1634/5, and states that she married again, by 1665, John Blanchard. His widow and her father, Richard Brackett, were probably the administrators of his estate in 1662.

Notes

Freeman, 1651

The colony’s record of 7 May 1651 (Shurtleff, Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, volume IV, part 1, page 459) has “Samuell Kingsly” beside Martin Saunders. Grade: on record. The entry names no town for Samuel; only Martin Saunders, beside him, is given as of Braintree.

Billerica, 1658 to 1661

Hazen, History of Billerica, Massachusetts (1883), compiled from the town records, gives his first residence at Billerica in 1658, a ten-acre grant in August 1659, a house lot of 100 acres south of Fox Hill, and his signature on the town agreement dated 24:8:1661, as Hazen gives it. Grade: compiled. The body hedges the first of these sentences. The Braintree register enters the family’s children until 1662, so the residence at Billerica before the 1662 death rests on this compiled history alone.

Estate, 1662

Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, under Kingsley: “his wid. and her f. were admors.” Grade: compiled. The Middlesex court’s own record of the 1662 administration, which would name the administrators, is not cited here, so the body’s “probably” stands.