♂William Pontus

William Pontus (died 9 February 1653) was a freeman of Plymouth Colony^W who held land at Plymouth and in September 1638 sat on the jury that convicted three colonists of robbing and murdering a Native man, Penowanyanquis^W. All three were hanged: the colony put its own men to death for the killing. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Hannah Pontus (1623–1690).

Leiden

He was probably the William Pautes, a fustian^W-worker “from near Dover”, who married Wybra Hanson at Leiden in Holland on 4 December 1610, when William Brewster^W, the elder of the Pilgrim church, stood as his witness. Brewster was himself one of Roger’s ninth great-grandfathers, through another line. If William was that man, he belonged to the company of English exiles at Leiden from which the Pilgrims came, and he was among the members of the congregation who did not sail on the Mayflower in 1620.

Plymouth

He was at Plymouth by 1633, when his name was entered in the list of the freemen of the colony, and his wife, known only as “Goodwife Pontus”, is said to have been living there that year. The General Court had granted him two lots of land, forty acres in all, at Thorp, near Windberry Hill, with the trees and timber on them, and he built a house there.

To make room for more people in the town of New Plymouth he gave the lots back, except about five acres round the house, and on 5 March 1637/8 the court confirmed the house and land to him and his heirs and granted him six acres more towards the new field, between the lands of John Dunham the elder and John Dunham the younger. On 1 February 1640/1 a jury laid out a highway for him and John Dunham from their meadows at the waterside, and on 31 December 1641 the town granted him two acres of upland to go with his half acre of meadow in the woods beyond his house, near Agawam path.

He served on the colony’s juries. On 7 June 1636 he was one of the jurors who found against Helen Billington in a suit for slander and against Stephen Hopkins^W, one of the governor’s assistants, in a suit for battery; he sat again on 7 March 1636/7, and in September 1638 at the Penowanyanquis trial. When Robert Hicks of Plymouth died in 1647, his will left twenty shillings to “William Pontus”.

Family and death

His two daughters married at Plymouth within a year of each other: Hannah to John Churchill on 18 December 1644, and Mary to James Glass on 31 October 1645. On 10 January 1647/8, when James Glass bought six acres of upland bordering William’s land, William gave up about half an acre of his own to his neighbor John Dunham “in the behalfe of his soon in law James glasse”, so that Glass could have the timber on his new ground.

James Glass is said to have been lost in a storm near the harbor in September 1652, and William Pontus died at Plymouth on 9 February 1653, five months later. By a will of 1650 he is said to have left his small estate to his two daughters. In January 1653/4 Mary and her second husband, Philip Delano of Duxbury, sold John Churchill and Bennaiah Pratt the house and land “sometimes the house and land of William Pontus and James Glasse both deceased”.

Notes

Pontus and Pautes

That William Pontus of Plymouth was the William Pautes of Leiden is the identification made in Gardner Asaph Churchill and Nathaniel Wiley Jones, The Churchill Family in America (1904), p. 2. It rests on Charles B. Richardson’s notes from the Leiden records, published in the Historical Magazine, vol. 3 (1859): a list of members of the congregation who did not embark in the Mayflower (p. 358) names “William Pautes (Pontus), fustian-worker, from Dover”, and the marriage entry (p. 263) names William Brewster as witness for “William Pautes, fustian-worker, from near Dover” on his marriage with “Wybra Hanson, maid”. The book’s further evidence is a name: his daughter Mary Glass called a daughter Wybra, born on 9 August 1649. Torrey’s New England Marriages Prior to 1700 lists the Leiden marriage under William Pontus. The identification is likely but unproven.

The records at Plymouth

The freemen’s list of 1633, the land grants of 1637/8 and 1641, the highway of 1640/1, the juries of 1636, 1636/7 and 1638, and the marriages of both daughters are in the Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, vols. 1, 2 and 7. The deed of 10 January 1647/8 is in vol. 12, p. 150. Robert Hicks’s will and the Delano sale of 1653/4 are given in Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, citing the Mayflower Descendant (8:144-46 and 5:92-93). “Goodwife Pontus” in 1633 is from the family history, citing the Mayflower Descendant, 1:160. The record gives “Windberry Hill” and “Agawem Payth”.

The date of death

The Plymouth Colony register enters “Wiliam Pontus died the 9th of Febrewary” among the deaths of 1652, under the old reckoning in which the year ran to 24 March, and its printed index gives 9 February 1652. In the modern reckoning that is 9 February 1652/3, the date the family history and James Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England give as 9 February 1653.

His age

Savage points out that he is not in the Plymouth list of 1643 of men able to bear arms, which took in men from sixteen to sixty, and so takes him to have been over sixty by then. An anthology of Pilgrim sources gives his life as about 1583 to about 1653. Neither names a record of his birth.

The will, the storm and the homestead

Savage dates the will 9 September 1650 and says it left a very small estate to his two children; the family history gives the will as of 1650, to his two daughters. Neither prints it. James Glass’s loss in a storm near the harbor on 3 September 1652 is from Savage. The family history suggests the Pontus home lay near the southwestern limits of the “Mile and a half tract”, as shown on maps of 1701; the anthology of Pilgrim sources has him settling along the Eel River, several miles south of the town.