♂William Goodrich

William Goodrich (1622 – 1676) was a settler of Wethersfield in the Connecticut Colony^W who held the militia rank of ensign, and whose brother, a Suffolk clergyman also named William Goodrich, left English land to his sons in a will of 1677. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Goodrich (1653–1730).

Origins

Hale, House and Related Families (1952), a compiled family history, gives his baptism at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, on 13 February 1621/22. Compiled genealogies and a memorial on a grave-index website give his birth as 13 February 1622 at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, and an older family record places it at Hessett, near Bury; these rest on compilation.

The same compiled history names his parents as John Goodrich, a clothier of Bury St Edmunds who died on 21 April 1632, and Margery How, who had married him at St James’ there on 7 August 1615 and died in 1632. Its account of the father’s will of 14 April 1632 names his sons “William the elder” and “William the younger”, and identifies the elder as the Rev. William Goodrich of Hessett, whose 1677 will calls the Wethersfield settler “my Brother William Goodrich”. The one document found that speaks of his English family, his brother’s will, names brothers, nephews and cousins, but not their parents.

Wethersfield

On 4 October 1648 he married Sarah Marvin at Hartford; the town record, as indexed, spells his name “Goodredg”. The couple made their home at Wethersfield, where their eldest son, John, was born in 1653.

On 7 March 1649/50 the Particular Court at Hartford swore him in as constable of Wethersfield for the year ahead. On 15 May 1656 the General Court of Election at Hartford made him a freeman^W of Connecticut Colony.

He and his neighbor John Nott went to law twice in 1656. On 5 June he sued Nott for unjustly detaining swine, with the damage put at 20 shillings, and the Quarter Court ordered Nott to pay the costs of court. On 4 December Nott sued him over trespass by cattle, for 42 shillings, and the jury found for Goodrich. In March 1657 the town is said to have chosen him, with John Deming Jr. and John Nott, to run the boundary between Wethersfield and Hartford.

The county and town records show him trusted with his neighbors’ affairs. In March 1662/63 the court ordered him and Samuel Boreman to distribute an estate among its creditors, and in December 1664 he was one of the men who valued the estate of John Edwards of Wethersfield, where the clerk wrote his name “William Gutteridg”. In 1666/67 the town put him on a committee that arranged to exchange the town’s house lot for a dwelling for the minister, and in 1670 and again in 1674/75 on committees to reseat, repair and enlarge the meeting house. When a list of the town’s freemen was returned in October 1669, he was entered as “Ens. Will. Goodrich”.

Death and estate

He died in 1676, before 14 November, when the estate of “Ensign William Goodrich” was valued at £915 1s 6d. The inventory names four sons, John aged 23, William 17, Ephraim 14 and David 10, and notes that the daughters were married. On 6 December 1676 the county court gave the administration to his widow, Sarah, and ordered the estate divided: £100 of the personal estate to her outright and a third of the land for life, £230, £150, £140 and £130 to the sons in order of age, and portions of £80 to £100 to four married daughters, Mrs. Hollister and the wives of Robert Welles, Thomas Fitch and Joseph Butler. In January 1677 Joseph Butler gave the widow a receipt for his wife’s portion of “fower score pounds”.

The English legacy

On 12 May 1677, about six months after his death, William Goodrich “of Hegessett, in the County of Suffolk, Clerk” made his will. After the death of the testator’s widow, Rebecca, a copyhold close of about seven acres called Robletts, at Stowmarket, was to go to “John, the Eldest Son of my Brother William Goodrich”, with money besides, and, if John died first without children, the close was to pass to “William, the next Son of my Brother William Goodrich”. Those are the two eldest sons named in the Wethersfield inventory. The house at Hessett went to Joseph, the eldest son of a third brother, John Goodrich of Wethersfield, and the nephews were to be paid when they should “Come so Soon out of New England to Receive the Same”, or send for it with sufficient authority. In July 1678 a kinsman at Bury, Henry Bull, wrote to “Cozen Goodrich” in Connecticut that the clergyman had died at Hegessett, “near Bury”, and “left no children”. A copy of the will and Bull’s letters survive among the Connecticut colony’s court papers, and an original will of William Goodrich of Hessett, dated 1678 in the catalogue, is held among the probate records of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury^W at the Suffolk Record Office.

The will’s word is “brother”. A Goodrich family genealogy published in 1889 ventured only “probably brother-in-law”. The records do not explain why both brothers were given the name William.

Notes

Several compilations give his death as 14 November 1676, which is the day his estate was valued. A family genealogy published in 1856 places him and his brother John first at Watertown, Massachusetts, where it lists land recorded to a William Goodrich, before a move to Wethersfield about 1636, and a town history published in 1904 counts him, on its own surmise, among the Wethersfield men in the Pequot War of 1637. If he was born near his baptism on 13 February 1621/22 he was then fourteen or fifteen; neither claim has been checked against the records.

The 1657 boundary committee

The committee comes from Henry R. Stiles’s compiled history of Wethersfield (The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut, vol. I), the only source listed for it. Stiles dates the choosing 6 March 1657 without saying whether Old or New Style is meant, and says the line was to be run on the 25th.