♂William Gillett

William Gillett (died before 16 April 1641) was an English clergyman, rector of Chaffcombe, a parish in Somerset, from 1610. His son Nathan crossed to New England in the Great Migration^W of the 1630s and became an early settler of Windsor, in the Connecticut Colony^W. He was most likely the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Jonathan Gillett (1609–1677), who settled at Windsor too.

Chaffcombe

He was instituted as rector of Chaffcombe in 1610. Eight of his children are known: the sons Jonathan, Elias, Nathan, William, Thomas and Jeremiah, and the daughters Habiah and Mary. His wife’s name is not known. Elias was baptized at Chaffcombe on 11 February 1611/2, and Nathan, born by about 1613, may have been born there next after him. Jonathan was probably older, and he may have been born wherever the family lived before William came to the parish.

In the early 1630s Jonathan and Nathan left Chaffcombe for New England. Both settled first at Dorchester, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony^W, whose General Court admitted Nathan a freeman on 14 May 1634 and Jonathan on 6 May 1635. Within a few years both brothers had moved on to Windsor.

His will

He made his will in 1641 as “William Gyllett of Chaffcombe”. He left bequests to his daughters Habiah and Mary and his sons William, Thomas and Jeremiah, and a gift “To all my children in England”. Among the property it disposed of was land that his son Nathan, by then settled across the Atlantic, had made over to his father by letter of attorney. It is the will’s one link to the sons in New England. Jonathan is not named at all. The editor who printed the will in 1910 thought it highly probable that the sons who emigrated had been given their shares before they left England.

He chose four overseers, Mr Joseph Greenfield, Mr Luffe, “my brother Richard, and my kinsman Henry Hutchins”. He was dead by 16 April 1641, when his son William, the executor, proved the will at Taunton.

Notes

Sources

His years at Chaffcombe, Elias’s baptism and the careers of Jonathan and Nathan in New England come from Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, volume II (1995), pages 766–772. Anderson takes the year of William’s institution, 1610, from George E. McCracken’s article in The American Genealogist, volume 55 (1979), pages 170–173. Elias’s baptism comes from the Bishops’ Transcripts for Chaffcombe, which survive only for scattered years. An earlier article by Coddington in The American Genealogist (1939), as quoted in a later collection, dates the institution 4 February 1609/10, which is 1610 by the modern reckoning, and says that he died early in 1641.

The will

The will is known from an abstract printed in “Clues from English Archives Contributory to American Genealogy”, The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, volume 41 (1910), pages 282–283, from the Taunton wills of 1641, file 13. The abstract spells the name Gyllett and gives the year of the will as 1641, with no day. The line about Nathan reads “Land which my son Nathan made over to me by letter of Attorney”; Anderson quotes it too.

His son Jonathan

Only Nathan of the two emigrant brothers is named in the will. Since it was printed, Jonathan and Nathan of Dorchester and Windsor have been taken as William’s sons, “although there have been some nagging doubts”, as Anderson puts it. Anderson adds that McCracken’s article of 1979 “makes the identification solid”, and he calls each brother “son of Rev. William Gillett”. Coddington had already written that “There can be very little doubt but that Jonathan Gillett was the son of the Reverend William Gillett or Gyllett, Rector of Chaffcombe”. A later article by Mahler in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, volume 162 (2008), pages 113–114, is reported to quote another will with a bequest to “Jonathan Gillet the sonne of Will[iam] Gillett Clarke p[ar]son of Chafecome”; that quotation is known only from a later compiled profile. The link is strong, but it rests on these compiled studies, so Jonathan is given as most likely his son.