♂Thomas Cook

Thomas Cook (died 6 February 1674) was a butcher of Portsmouth, in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations^W, where he was received as an inhabitant in 1643 and sat as a deputy in 1664. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through his son John Cook (1630–1691).

Netherbury and Portsmouth

He was christened at Netherbury, Dorset, England, on 23 April 1600, the register calling him “Thomas fil Th. Bowcher”, son of Thomas Bowcher. His son John was most likely the “Johannes Cooke or Butcher”, son of “Thoma Cooke or Butcher”, christened there on 30 March 1630. In 1643 Portsmouth received him as an inhabitant; he gave his engagement to the government and was put forward for a lot. On 25 October 1649 he is said to have bought from William Brenton the parcel of land on which he had already built his house. He was admitted a freeman^W in 1655 and was granted eight acres in 1657.

On 14 May 1660, called “Thomas Cook, Sr. alias butcher”, he deeded eighty acres to his son “John Cook, alias butcher”. The land lay partly beside that of his other son Thomas, a captain, whose title set him apart from his father. In 1664 the elder Thomas served as a deputy.

Family

John’s mother was probably an earlier wife whose name is not known: in 1678 John called Thomas’s widow, Mary, his stepmother. Four children are known. John became a butcher like his father. Captain Thomas married Mary Havens and had died by 1670, leaving young children. Sarah married Peter Parker, and of George nothing is known beyond his father’s will.

Will and death

Thomas Cook died on 6 February 1674. His will made his wife Mary executrix, with Obadiah Holmes^W of Newport and Joseph Torrey as overseers, and left her the mansion house and its land for her life with the whole of the movable estate. John had a cow, and each of John’s children a shilling. After Mary’s death the house, land and orchard were to go to the grandson John, son of the dead Captain Thomas, who was to pay his brothers George, Stephen and Ebenezer their shares when they came of age; Captain Thomas’s two youngest daughters, Phebe and Martha, were to have fifteen pounds apiece. Sarah Parker and her three children had small legacies.

The will closes, by the abstract of it, with a legacy for his son George only “if my son George Cook come to demand it”. The words suggest George was away; the records do not say where. The will was proved on 20 June 1677. Mary married Jeremiah Brown about 1680, and in 1680 and 1683 the couple were still paying his legacies to Captain Thomas’s daughters.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son John Cook (1630–1691), his grandson John Cook (1656–1737) and John’s daughter Ruth Cook, who married Preserved Fish. Two of Ruth’s children carried them on: her son Thomas Fish (1703–1786), whose granddaughter was Waite Allen (1766–1850), and her daughter Amy Fish (1705–1745), whose grandson was Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828). Waite and Batchelder married each other, and the two lines meet again in their daughter Salena Sherman (1806–1842), through whom both descend to Roger.

Notes

Sources for his life

What is known of him comes from John Osborne Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887), which abstracts the Portsmouth records in its account of the family of Thomas Cook (pp. 282–284): “He was a butcher”, with the 1643 admission, the 1649 purchase, the 1655 freemanship, the 1657 grant, the 1660 deed, the 1664 deputyship and the will. Austin is a compiled work; the town and probate records behind it are cited but not reproduced. Austin gives no birth date or place for him, and leaves the name of his first wife blank.

English origin

John’s Netherbury christening of 1630 is on the register itself, as “Martij 30 Johannes filius Thomae Cooke als Butcher”, and a FamilySearch index of the Dorset parish registers gives it too. The alias “Butcher”, for both father and son, matches the 1660 deed in which Austin has Thomas Cook “Sr. alias butcher” give land to “son John Cook, alias butcher”, and so makes the identification likely. Weld’s Borden genealogy (1899) calls his son “John Cook, son of Thomas Cook of Providence”; Austin places the family at Portsmouth. Austin gives John’s birth as 1631, a year after the 1630 christening.

The christening of 1600

The register entry made under 23 April 1600 reads “Thomas fil Th. Bowcher”. Fiske (Thomas Cooke of Rhode Island, vol. 1, 1987, pp. 3–5) places a Thomas Cooke alias Bowcher at Netherbury from 1593, and judges it “more than likely” that the Thomas baptized in 1600 was the Rhode Island settler.

The will

Austin heads the abstract “1674, Feb. 6. Will—proved 1677, Jun. 20”, and a receipt of 31 March 1680 names Thomas Cook as having “deceased 1674, Feb. 6”. The abstract describes the grandson’s land as bounded partly by “brother Giles Slocum”; the records do not explain the tie. Austin has a single Obadiah Holmes, of Newport, and he is taken to be the overseer. The 1678 receipt has John calling the widow his “mother-in-law”, which Austin glosses as stepmother.

Other Cooks

Austin found no relationship between this Thomas Cook and Robert Cook of Portsmouth, who married Tamar Tyler in 1678, or Arthur Cook, who was at Portsmouth in 1653 and later moved to Philadelphia. This family is not that of the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke.