♂William Odding

William Odding (died 1612) was a weaver of Braintree, in Essex, England, who died within weeks of making his will in the autumn of 1612, leaving his wife Margaret and their daughter Sarah, who came to Roxbury, in Massachusetts, in 1633. He was most likely the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Sarah Odding (born 1612).

His will

William Oddyn, as the name is written, is said to have made his will at Braintree in October 1612. He called himself a webster, a weaver, and asked to be buried in the churchyard of Braintree. He made a bequest to his daughter “Sarahe” and named “Margaret my wief” his sole executrix, with William Barnard and James Wiseman as supervisors. The will was proved on 3 December 1612, so he had died by then. Margaret later married John Porter, and in 1633 she and Porter brought Sarah to Roxbury, in Massachusetts, where Sarah married Philip Sherman^W.

Notes

Name and identification

Older genealogies, among them A Family Tree of the Five Harvey Brothers, make Sarah a “daughter of George and Margaret Odding”. Patricia Law Hatcher’s study “Reconstructing Sarah (Odding) Sherman, Wife of Philip Sherman of Portsmouth, Rhode Island”, in The American Genealogist 73 (1998), set that aside. As Robert Charles Anderson’s Great Migration Newsletter summarizes it, she showed that Sarah, “who came to Roxbury in 1633 with her mother and stepfather was the daughter of William Odding of Braintree, Essex.” Writing again in 2001, Hatcher put it in one line: “Her father was William, not George, and she was from Essex, not Cornwall.”

The Roxbury church record names Sarah only as “the daughter o[f] the wife of John Porter by a former husband”, so the link to William rests on Hatcher’s study and his will. The line from Sarah to Roger also runs through her son John Sherman (1644–1734), a link that is itself probable rather than proven.

The will

The will is known from extracts quoted in online genealogies, which give its date both as 12 and as 21 October 1612. That he died at Braintree is an inference from the will, which calls him of Braintree and asks for burial there.