♂Thomas Cooke

Thomas Cooke (died 1614) was a parishioner of Netherbury, in Dorset, England, whom the parish clerks wrote down sometimes as Cooke and sometimes as Bowcher, Bocher or Butcher. He was probably the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through his son Thomas Cook (died 1674).

Netherbury

He was living at Netherbury by 20 November 1593, when his daughter Mary was baptized there as the daughter of Thomas Cooke. The parish’s surviving registers begin in that year, so nothing earlier is known of him. A second daughter, Joan, was baptized on 11 May 1596 as the daughter of Thomas Bocher and buried on 4 December 1596 as the daughter of Thomas Cooke. He seems to have answered to both surnames all his life, and the double name outlived him: his grandson John was baptized at Netherbury in 1630 as the son of Thomas Cooke alias Butcher, and a Rhode Island deed of 1660, as later abstracted, still calls his son “Thomas Cook, Sr. alias butcher”.

His first wife, whose name is not known, was apparently the wife of Thomas Bowcher buried at Netherbury on 8 January 1598/9. He is thought to have married Joan, his second wife, at Netherbury before 1600. On 23 April 1600 a son, Thomas, was baptized there as the son of Thomas Bowcher, and he was most likely Joan’s child.

Death

He was probably the Thomas Butcher buried at Netherbury on 20 May 1614, when his son Thomas was fourteen. Joan survived him and married Thomas Tackle at Netherbury on 2 February 1614/5. The cottage and garden she held on the manor of Yondover, in Netherbury, seems to have come to her through Thomas Cooke: when the manor was surveyed in 1626, it was his son, Thomas Cooke, who was named as the tenant in reversion^W, the one who would take the holding after her.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Thomas Cook, who most likely went to New England by 1637 and settled at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1643. From him they pass to his grandson John Cook (1630–1691), to John’s son John Cook (1656–1737) and to that John’s daughter Ruth Cook, two of whose children carried them on. The lines meet again in Salena Sherman (1806–1842), whose parents Waite Allen (1766–1850) and Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) both descend from Thomas Cooke, and through her both lines come down to Roger.

Notes

The Netherbury family

The family is reconstructed by Jane Fletcher Fiske in Thomas Cooke of Rhode Island, volume 1 (1987), pp. 3–6 and 11, from the Netherbury registers and the Yondover manor records. She takes the Thomas Cooke of the 1593 baptism, the Thomas Bocher of the 1596 baptism and the Thomas Bowcher of the 1600 baptism to be one man, and judges it “more than likely” that the Thomas baptized in 1600 was the Rhode Island settler. The alias itself is never written beside this Thomas’s name in the surviving records; Fiske notes that the name Butcher had nothing to do with the family’s trade, its earliest forms being Bowcher, Bocher and Boocher. The 1600 baptism is entered in the register as “Thomas fil Th. Bowcher”. No record of either of his marriages is known.

The first wife

The register gives the burial of 8 January 1598/9 only as “Bowcher, ux Thomas”, with no first name. Fiske treats it as the burial of a first wife, the mother of Mary and Joan, which leaves fifteen months between her death and the 1600 baptism; she also allows that it may have been the burial of Thomas’s mother, a child entered in error, or a member of another family. Fiske dates the second marriage to 1599; it is given here as before 1600, the year of the baptism.

His burial and birth

The burial of 20 May 1614 is indexed under the name Thomas Butcher. Fiske gives his birth as “perhaps about 1570”, and a Find a Grave index entry for a Thomas Cooke buried at Netherbury gives November 1570; neither rests on a baptism, and no birth date is given here.

Other Cookes and Butchers

A Thomas Cooke was listed as an “able archer” in Netherbury tithing^W in the Dorset militia roll of 1569; Fiske does not know whether he was this man or his father. Ambrose Butcher alias Cooke, who lived at Netherbury from 1599 and was buried there on 22 January 1615/6, used the same two names and may have been a brother, but nothing proves or disproves it. Another Thomas Butcher, who married Alicia Hallett at Netherbury (24 October 1604 in Fiske; an index gives 24 October 1601, another 14 October 1605) and later died at Toller Porcorum, belonged to a different family.