♂Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell was a man of Plymouth Colony. A deed of 1 August 1672 names a Thomas Mitchell of Duxbury who sold a share of land that his grandfather had given him, the Mayflower passenger Francis Cooke^W. He was the eighth great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Elizabeth Mitchell (1629–1684), Nancy Jane’s eighth great-grandmother.

Family

Mayflower Families, the genealogy of Francis Cooke’s descendants, makes him a son of Experience Mitchell (1602–1689) and Jane Cooke (1604–1640), born at Plymouth. It places his birth after 22 May 1627, when Jane was still unmarried, and before 15 October 1640, “quite possibly about 1630”. Mayflower Families takes the later limit from a sale on 15 October 1661, when Edward Gray sold land at Dartmouth to a Thomas Mitchell of Plymouth, planter, whom it takes to have been at least twenty-one.

Land at Old Cooke’s Holes

Francis Cooke had been granted a tract of sixty acres called Old Cooke’s Holes, at the Jones River meadow, in place of land near Smelt Brook. A General Court order of 5 July 1670 confirmed the grant and recorded that Cooke had given the land to Richard Wright, who had married Cooke’s daughter Hester, and to Thomas Michell, and that after Cooke’s death his heir John Cooke had confirmed the gift to both.

On 1 August 1672 Thomas Mitchell of Duxbury sold his share to Richard Wright of Plymouth, stating in the deed that it was given him by his grandfather Francis Cooke of Plymouth. Mayflower Families takes that Thomas Mitchell to be this man, though the identification is probable rather than proved. Mayflower Families treats the deed as establishing him as Jane Cooke’s son, and gives him as living on that day and as dying some time after it; no date of death is recorded. He is not among the children named in his father’s will.

Notes

Parentage

The deed names his grandfather but not his parents. Mayflower Families takes a grandson of Francis Cooke named Mitchell to be a child of Jane Cooke and Experience Mitchell, and the birth limits above are its own inferences, not recorded dates.

His father’s will

Experience Mitchell’s will, dated 5 December 1689 by the clerk and taken by the compilers as an error for 1684, names sons Edward and John, three daughters, and “my Grandson Thomas Mitchell” and “my Grand daughter Mary Mitchell”. It does not name a son Thomas, and it does not say whose children the two grandchildren were.

Block Island

A Thomas Mitchell, a hatter, appears in the records of Block Island (New Shoreham), Rhode Island, on 8 January 1677/8 and had died before 6 May 1687. Some writers have suggested he is this man, since the Plymouth records end with 1672 and a Thomas Mitchell of Rhode Island appears in an inventory of 1673. No record ties the Block Island hatter to this man; Mayflower Families calls the identification a working hypothesis.

A cousin of the same name

The Thomas Mitchell of Amsterdam who wrote on 24 July 1662 to “his uncle Experience Mitchell” was a nephew of Experience, not this Thomas.