♂Thomas Fowle

Thomas Fowle (born about 1540 – buried 25 August 1592) was a landholder of Frittenden, in Kent, England, and churchwarden of the parish in 1573. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) by two separate lines of descent, through his son Richard Fowle (1569–1632).

Marriages and children

Thomas was probably born about 1540, a son of Richard Fowle of Frittenden. He married his first wife, Elizabeth Carre, at Frittenden on 22 October 1564. Thomas’s second wife, Joane, was most likely the mother of his daughter Joane, christened on 6 May 1568, and of his son Richard, christened at Frittenden on 18 December 1569. Joane was buried at Frittenden on 21 May 1570, when Richard was five months old. A son of Thomas’s whose name is not recorded, by his first or his second wife, was buried there on 18 January 1571/2.

His father made his will on 3 September 1570, leaving Thomas lands in Frittenden and Marden, and was buried at Frittenden on 5 May 1572. By then Thomas had married a third time. With his third wife, Margery, he had six more children: William, christened in 1571/2, Francis, Marion, Thomas and Clemence, and a son John, christened on 19 January 1574/5, who was buried on 2 June 1580 at the age of five. Margery was buried at Frittenden on 13 January 1584/5, by which time Clemence, the youngest, had been born.

Later years

Thomas served as churchwarden of Frittenden in 1573. He made his will as Thomas Fowle of Frittenden on 20 April 1587, and he was buried at Frittenden on 25 August 1592.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his son Richard Fowle (1569–1632) and Richard’s daughter Joan Fowle (1604–1688), who married Richard Borden. They meet again in Salena Sherman (1806–1842), whose parents Waite Allen (1766–1850) and Batchelder Sherman (1761–1828) both descended from Thomas.

Notes

Sources

His life, his three marriages, his children’s christenings and burials, and the wills of Thomas and his father are from G. Andrews Moriarty’s account of the family, “Fowle-Borden”, in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 75 (1921), pp. 226–233, built from the Frittenden and Headcorn parish registers, Kent wills and the lay subsidy rolls. Moriarty gives his birth as “probably about 1540”; no baptism is printed.

The mother of Joane and Richard

Moriarty places Joane and Richard as probably the children of the second wife, Joane, and the unnamed son buried in January 1571/2 as a child of the first or the second wife. No register entry names the mother of any of them.

Dates

Years written 1571/2 or 1584/5 are Old Style^W dates, when the year began on 25 March.