♀Susanna Hinckley

Susanna Hinckley (baptized 6 November 1625) was an early settler of Barnstable in Plymouth Colony^W and the wife of the minister John Smith, who later became pastor at Sandwich. She was the eighth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Benjamin Smith (1659–1720).

Early life

Susanna was baptized at St Mildred’s church in Tenterden, Kent, on 6 November 1625, the daughter of Samuel Hinckley. In April 1635 she came to New England in the Hercules of Sandwich with her parents and two sisters. Her father’s will, dated 8 October 1662 and proved at Plymouth on 4 March 1662/3, names her with her sisters and leaves a shilling to each of them and to each of their children; she was living then, with children of her own. Her mother, Sarah, was most likely born a Soole.

Marriage and family

Charles Banks’s history of Martha’s Vineyard, published in 1925, names her as a daughter of Samuel Hinckley and a sister of Thomas Hinckley^W, later governor of Plymouth Colony. Banks dates the marriage to John Smith 13 June 1643. Their contract of marriage, dated 22 May 1643, is one of only three entries that the Barnstable pastor John Lothrop^W kept in his church records under the heading “Contraction”, as Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter notes; the entry puts the contract “at o[ur] Syster Hinckleyes house”.

Banks names thirteen children born to them between April 1644 and December 1667. Seven of them were baptized in Rev. John Lothrop’s Barnstable church register between 1644 and 1653, and two of those seven, Ebenezer and the elder John, were buried as infants. Among the thirteen was Benjamin, born on 7 January 1658/59, through whom the family reached Martha’s Vineyard. The Barnstable church admitted her on 13 June 1652, recording her as “wife of John Smith”, some years after her husband. Her husband was pastor at Sandwich from 1673 to 1689, by Banks’s dates.

Notes

Both John Smith and Susanna Hinckley are known only from printed sources.

Savage names Susanna as John’s wife and the daughter of the first Samuel Hinckley, but adds that it is not certain she was the mother of all of John’s children.

Banks’s range of birth dates for the children begins in April 1644, but the earliest child baptism in the Barnstable register is on 20 October 1644.

Her parents

Her baptism is entered at St Mildred’s as “1625 Susannah Hinckley daughter of Samuell Hinckley 6 November” (French, NEHGR 65 (1911), p. 315). Her father’s will (NEHGR 6:95) names a daughter Susannah. The passenger list for the Hercules of Sandwich, April 1635, names the party as “Samuel Hinckley of Tenterden and Sara his wife; children Susan, Sara and Mary Hinckley” (Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants 1607–1660, p. 131). The list spells the mother’s name “Sara”. The full text of the will, dated 8 October 1662, is printed in The Mayflower Descendant, vol. 12 (1910), pp. 203–205.

Her mother’s maiden name

Her mother’s maiden name, Soole, rests on a marriage at Hawkhurst, Kent, on 7 May 1617, recorded as “Samuell Hinckley and Sarah Soole” (NEHGR 68 (1914), p. 186). The identification of that couple with the emigrant family is Elizabeth French’s, and the register names no residence for them, so the link is French’s reasoning rather than a statement in the register. The reasoning has one support: the same Hawkhurst register has Thomas Hinckley, the later governor, baptized there on 19 March 1619/20 as “sonne of Samuell Hincle”, which fits a Samuel Hinckley living at Hawkhurst at that time.

The 1994 chart’s dates

The family chart compiled in 1994 gives her a birth in England about 1614 and a death at Sandwich on 2 October 1710. Those are the figures George Thomas Little’s Genealogical and Family History of the State of Maine gives for her husband, and they rest on a deposition about John Chipman that was long attached to John Smith. Neither is used here. No record of her death is known, and the 1625 baptism is the earliest record of her.