♂Walter Harris

Walter Harris (died 6 November 1654) came from Honiton, in Devon, to New England in the 1630s, lived at Weymouth and Dorchester in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, and died at New London, Connecticut, five months after the town made him its ordinary keeper. On the day he died, the town voted that his widow might keep the ordinary in his place “if she will”. He was the eleventh great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006) by two separate lines of descent, both through his daughter Sarah Harris (died 1695).

In Devon

Walter was probably born in the 1590s. He and his wife Mary were married by 1621, when the first of their seven children was baptized at Honiton, in Devon; the last was baptized there in 1636. Their first child, a daughter Mary, died young, and a later daughter was given the same name.

Weymouth and Dorchester

In April 1637 the Speedwell, bound from Weymouth, in Dorset, for New England, listed among its passengers “Walter Harris, his wife, six children & three servants”, almost certainly this family. They settled at Weymouth in Massachusetts, where Walter was granted land in the “west Field”, eight acres in “Harrises Raing” and eight acres in the “mill furlonge”. In December 1643 he helped appraise the estate of William Fry of Weymouth, most likely his wife’s brother.

By December 1648 the family had moved to Dorchester, where the town at first opposed his building “as not knowing him to haue sufficient ground to set it vp”. When Edward Bullock of Dorchester made his will in July 1649, the debts annexed to it included “a pecke of Rye, for tryming for a hatt” owed to Walter Harris.

New London

On 20 May 1652 “Water Harries of Dorchester” asked for a house lot at the south end of New London. He was still at Dorchester in March 1652/3 but had moved before 5 December 1653, when the town gave his son Gabriel six acres for a house lot “joyning next to his fathers”. In June 1654 the town chose him as its ordinary keeper, the keeper of its licensed inn. New London’s nineteenth-century historian, Frances Manwaring Caulkins, ranked the family with “the well-to-do portion of the community”.

Walter died at New London on 6 November 1654. That same day the town voted that “Widdo Harris” might keep the ordinary “if she will”; she evidently declined, for the town chose John Elderkin in his place. Mary died eleven weeks later, on 24 January 1655/6, and one inventory, dated 14 April 1656, served for both their estates. Five children were living, or thought to be, when she made her will: Sarah, most likely the wife of George Lane of Hingham; Mary, the wife of Nicholas Lawrence; Elizabeth Weekes; Thomas; and Gabriel, who inherited the house and land.

Lines of descent

Both lines run through his daughter Sarah Harris, his granddaughter Sarah Lane (born 1638) and her daughter Sarah Lewis (1661–1732). They meet again in Wesley Blanchard (1844–1908), whose parents, Joseph Knapp Blanchard (1820–1885) and Elizabeth Trueworthy Blanchard (1825–1884), were both descended from Walter and Mary. On Joseph’s side the line runs from Sarah Lewis through her daughter Susannah Lincoln (born 1688), Elizabeth Colson (1723–1798), Sarah Hovey (1747–1805), Nicholas Blanchard (1766–1849) and Noah Blanchard (1797–1875). From Wesley the descent to Nancy Jane Blanchard runs as one, through George Wesley Blanchard (1868–1939) and Kenneth Blanchard (1897–1975).

Notes

Sources

The family’s history rests on Gale Ion Harris, “Walter and Mary (Fry) Harris of New London, Connecticut”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 156 (2002): 145–49, which transcribes the town, land and probate records quoted above. His death, “November 6, 1654”, is from the New London town records, as cited there and by Caulkins’s History of New London (1860). The Honiton baptisms are from a 1919 transcript of the Honiton parish register; the Weymouth grants are from Chamberlain’s History of Weymouth (1923); the Dorchester entries are from the printed Dorchester town records. The Speedwell list is printed in Coldham’s Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607–1660, page 185. The estimate of his birth in the 1590s is the article’s, worked out from the dates of his children’s baptisms.

The crossing

A Walter Harris also appears among sixteen men on a list dated at London on 7 March 1631/2 for New England, and he has sometimes been taken for this man. Since Walter’s children were being baptized at Honiton at regular intervals until 1636, the article rejects that identification: the London passenger was an indentured servant at Plymouth in 1633 and is not seen afterwards. The Speedwell entry, a man with a wife and six children in 1637, fits a family whose first child had died young.

His wife’s family

Mary’s maiden name is an inference. In 1643 Walter appraised the Weymouth estate of William Fry, whose spoken will left “a kid” each to “Thomas Harris, Thomas Rawlens & John Meggs his three sisters youngest children”; Mary’s own will names “my sister Migges”, “my sister Hannah Rawlin” and “my two cosens Mary and Elizabeth ffry”. The article concludes that Mary was William Fry’s sister, and Burton W. Spear’s series on the passengers of the Mary & John, a study of West Country emigrant families, gives the same family.

Sarah Lane

Mary’s will names “my eldest daughter Sarah Lane” and Sarah’s daughters Mary and Sarah. The article identifies her with Sarah, wife of George Lane of Hingham, whose daughters included a Sarah and a Mary, and with the Sarah baptized at Honiton on 13 March 1624/5. The identification is strong but rests on these matches rather than on a record naming her as Walter’s daughter, so the link is treated here as probable.