♂Thomas Mills

Thomas Mills (died before 27 June 1689) was an Englishman from Exeter, in Devon, who settled on the coast of Maine at Saco and later at Wells. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Susanna Mills. His birthplace is known from his daughter Martha’s baptism: carried off from Berwick in the raid on Salmon Falls^W in March 1690, on 29 June 1693 Martha was baptised as an adult in the Catholic church of Notre-Dame in Montreal, and the act names her father as “native of Excester in Old [England]”.

Saco and Wells

In August 1642 he and James Gibbins bought a hundred acres at Winter Harbor, the harbor at Saco, which had lately belonged to Henry Boade. He is said to have made his living as a fisherman, and in 1661 he sued John Snelling of Saco for keeping back fish. He married Mary Wadleigh, a daughter of John Wadleigh of Wells, who had been born at Bristol, in England. Their daughter Martha was born at Saco in 1653. The family then moved down the coast to Wells, where Thomas was granted land in 1659 and served as constable in 1664.

On 18 July 1664 Mary’s father gave her a deed of gift of land and marsh at Wells, which is said to have taken in the house the family was living in. When John Wadleigh made his will on 7 July 1671 he left Mary a pair of oxen, household goods and a share of his cattle.

Family

Mary had five children who are known, most likely all by Thomas: John, Mary, Sarah, Susanna and Martha. Mary and Sarah married the brothers John and Nathaniel Cloyes of Wells, and on 6 July 1681 Thomas gave Nathaniel a parcel of marsh. Susanna married Isaac Cousins of Wells and later Lieutenant Peter Folsom of Exeter, and Martha married James Smith of Berwick.

Thomas was living on 12 July 1681. He had died by 27 June 1689, when a deed for part of John Wadleigh’s farm at Wells described it as “adjoining to the land of Tho’ Mills Dec’d”.

Notes

His birthplace

The act of Martha’s baptism, as Emma Lewis Coleman translates it in New England Captives Carried to Canada (1925), names her parents as “Thomas Mills, native of Excester in Old [England] and of Marie Wadele native of Brestol near London”. The Quebec parish registers index the same baptism, at Notre-Dame, Montreal, on 29 June 1693, with father Thomas Mills and mother “Marie Wadelo”.

Susanna’s father

Susanna’s mother is proved by a York County deed of 1722 (Book XI, folio 5), in which Susanna, as the widow of Lieutenant Peter Folsom, sold part of the land “that John Wadleigh of Wells aforesaid gave unto his Daughter Mary Mills” by the deed of gift of 18 July 1664. That Thomas Mills was her father is the reading of the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire and of Elizabeth Knowles Folsom’s Genealogy of the Folsom Family (1938), which both list her among his children. The records point the same way: Martha’s baptism names Thomas Mills as the husband of Mary Wadleigh; a deed of 1685, as Folsom abstracts it, bounds part of the Wadleigh farm “on land of uncle Thomas Mills”; and the deed of 27 June 1689 (Book VI, folio 148), by which Peter Folsom “with Susannah my wife” sold shares of that farm, places it beside “the land of Tho’ Mills Dec’d”. No record names Susanna as his daughter, so the link rests on these together and is counted as probable.

Sources for his life

The 1642 purchase at Winter Harbor, his trade, his lands at Wells (York Deeds 12:336), his term as constable, the 1661 suit, the gift and will of John Wadleigh, the 1681 gift of marsh to Nathaniel Cloyes and his being alive on 12 July 1681 (York Deeds 3:105) come from the Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (entries Mills, Gibson, Snelling, Wadleigh and Cloyes). The date of the 1664 deed of gift is recited in the 1722 deed.