♂William Goodrich

William Goodrich (buried 24 October 1631) was a yeoman of Hessett, a farming parish a few miles east of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, England, and the grandfather of the two Goodrich brothers, John and William, who settled at Wethersfield, Connecticut. He was the tenth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son John Goodrich (died 1632).

Family and will

He had six children, John, Robert, William, Henry, Susan and Elizabeth; Robert, William, Henry and Susan were baptized at Hessett between 1577 and 1591. By the time he made his will, both daughters were married, Elizabeth to Philip Clarke and Susan to John Beamand.

The will, made on 4 April 1631 and known from a printed abstract, left the land whole to one son and money to three of the others. All his houses, lands and tenements in Hessett, freehold and copyhold^W alike, went to John, whom he named executor, and John was to pay out of them £16 to his brother William and £8 each to their sisters Elizabeth Clarke and Susan Beamand. The will names no wife. His son Henry is not named in it either, and the records do not explain why.

Death

He was buried at Hessett on 24 October 1631. The parish register, as the family’s genealogists print it, enters him in Latin as “Sepulti, Guglielmus Gotheridge vicesimo quarto Octobris”: buried, William Gotheridge, the twenty-fourth of October.

His son John, a clothier in Bury St Edmunds, outlived him by barely six months. When John made his own will on 14 April 1632, some of the money was apparently still owing, for he charged his wife to pay “all such legacies contained in my father’s will, which on my part are yet to be paid”. He left a house and lands at Hessett to his own son John, then under twenty-one and later a settler of Wethersfield, and was buried at Bury a week later, on 21 April.

Notes

Sources

The will is known from the abstract printed by Lafayette Wallace Case in The Goodrich Family in America (1889), p. 19, which spells the parish “Hegessett”; the witnesses were John Whyte and, by their marks, John Bewley, Richard Sharpe and John Copley. The abstract has the will proved in the archdeaconry court of Sudbury on 2 February, in a year it leaves unclear. The original is held by Suffolk Archives among that court’s original wills, catalogued as the will of William Goodrich of Hessett, yeoman, 1631. His son John’s will is printed in the same book, pp. 20–21.

The burial date and the Latin entry come from Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman, Hale, House and Related Families (1952), p. 551, which condenses Mary Lovering Holman’s 1948 study of the family’s English records.

The link to John Goodrich

That the Bury clothier was this man’s son rests on the two wills. William’s leaves his Hessett houses to “John Gooderich, my son”, his executor; John’s, a year later, disposes of a house and lands in Hessett and provides for the legacies still owed under his father’s will. Case (1889) and the 1952 genealogy both make the identification.

What the 1952 genealogy adds

It gives his birth as about 1545, probably in Suffolk, and names his wife as Margaret, buried at Hessett on 22 March 1630/1, less than two weeks before he made his will. It thinks it “quite likely” that he was the man who married Margaret Richardson at Felsham, Suffolk, in 1568, and it lists a son Robert, baptized at Hessett on 5 May 1577, who is not named in the will. It also lists the six children as his and Margaret’s, with the Hessett baptisms of Robert, William, Henry and Susan.

Two wills of William Goodrich of Hessett

A later William Goodrich of Hessett, a clergyman whose will of 12 May 1677 left property to nephews in New England, was a different man: his grandson William Goodrich (1617–1678), the elder of John’s two sons of that name.