♂William Stickney

William Stickney (buried 25 January 1664) was among the first settlers of Rowley, in Essex County, Massachusetts, where his wife Elizabeth bore him seven children between 1640 and 1649, two pairs of them twins. He was most likely the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his son John Stickney (born 1640).

From Boston to Rowley

Where William came from in England is not settled, but he reached New England in the years of the Puritan migration^W. On 6 January 1638/9, by the Boston church records printed in a family genealogy of 1869, William Stickney and his wife Elizabeth were admitted to the First Church in Boston^W, he as “a husbandman”, and on 24 November 1639 the church dismissed him with three other members to gather a new church at Rowley. By the same account they had brought three children from England, Samuel, Amos and Mary.

At Rowley the town recorded seven more children born to William and Elizabeth between 1640 and 1649: John, Faith, Andrew, and two pairs of twins, Thomas and Elizabeth, born on 3 March 1646, and Adding and Mercy, born on 14 January 1648. A twin of each pair died young: Elizabeth was buried on 4 December 1659 and Adding on 17 September 1660, so that by the time William made his will eight of his ten children were living.

William was admitted a freeman^W of the colony on 7 October 1640, by the 1869 account, and built his house on a lot of an acre and a half on Wethersfield Street. The same genealogy records that he brought from England a quarto copy of the first edition of the King James Bible, printed in 1611, which passed from father to son with the Rowley homestead and was still in the family two centuries later.

Town and land

As the town grew, William took a hand in running it. By the 1869 account he sat in 1652 on the committee that drew up the agreement between Rowley and the first settlers of the Merrimack lands, later Bradford, was clerk of the market and a juror in 1653, and was chosen selectman^W in 1656 and again in 1661, when the records also call him lieutenant. The town granted him land in its fields and meadows.

With Elizabeth he sold land to Jeremiah Elsworth in 1660, and on 27 May 1662 the couple sold their forty acres of Merrimack land to James Barker for four pounds, while William bought the forty acres next to it from William Scales. Samuel Brocklebank witnessed both deeds of 1662; he was later an overseer of William’s will and one of the appraisers of his estate, and in 1680 his daughter Hannah Brocklebank married William’s son John.

Will and death

On 21 January 1664, “being weake of body”, William made his will and put his mark to it, and he was buried at Rowley on 25 January, four days later. The will left Elizabeth the use of the house, barn, orchard and Rowley lands for her life and made her sole executrix. The eldest sons had already been set up: Samuel received ten pounds more, and Amos only five, because, in the will’s words, “he having at noe time bene beneficiall to my estate”, though William had found him a trade.

The rest was shared equally among the six younger children. John was to have the homestead after his mother’s death, paying her three pounds ten shillings a year and wintering her two cows; Andrew had the Merrimack land and Thomas the land at the village, and the three daughters, Mary, Faith and Mercy, were to have their portions at marriage or when they came of age. Maximilian Jewett and Samuel Brocklebank, the friends he named as overseers, witnessed it and proved it on oath at Ipswich on 28 March 1665. The inventory valued the estate at £416 14s 1d, from the best bed and its furnishings to three yoke of oxen, his guns and three swords.

Notes

The seven Rowley births and the burials of William, of the twins Elizabeth and Adding, and of Mercy (14 January 1676) are in Rowley’s printed vital records, which name the parents William and Elizabeth (John’s entry spells her Elisabeth). The 1869 genealogy agrees on Thomas’s birth but gives the day of Adding’s and Mercy’s as the 4th, where the town record has the 14th. John’s birth on 14 March 1640 is the only Rowley birth of a John Stickney before 1660, and the will names “my sone John Stickney”; together they make John’s descent from William most likely, though the will is known only in transcript. The records number months from March, and the year then began on 25 March. The town book prints William’s burial as 25 January 1664, with no second year, and the will is dated “21 of January 1664”; since it was proved on 28 March 1665, both dates fall in January 1665 by modern reckoning, as does the twins’ birth of 14 January 1648 in 1649. The 1869 genealogy prints the burial as “1664-5”. Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary gives the death as 15 January 1665.

The church admission and dismissal, the freeman’s oath, the town offices, the deeds, the will, the inventory and the Bible rest on Matthew Adams Stickney’s The Stickney Family (1869), which prints the church and colony entries, abstracts the deeds with references to the Essex County deed books, and gives an attested copy of the will and inventory from the Essex probate files. The will and inventory are printed again, from the county’s probate files, in The Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, volume II (1917), pages 5 to 8, and the two transcripts agree on the bequests, the eight children named and the total of the inventory. The text of the originals is not known. A genealogical history of Maine published in 1909 and Savage’s dictionary repeat the outline. The births of Samuel, Amos and Mary in England, about 1633, 1635 and 1637, come from the 1869 book alone; they are not in the Rowley records.

The English origin is unproven. The 1869 book says it was “inferred” from English records that he was the William Stickney baptized at St Mary’s Church, Frampton, Lincolnshire, on 6 September 1592, son of William Stickney and Margaret Peirson; the 1909 history, following it, prints the date as 6 April 1592. Both, and Savage, report the tradition that he sailed from Hull, in Yorkshire, and came in 1637 or 1638. The granite obelisk his descendants raised over his grave at Rowley in 1865 gives his birth as Frampton, 1592.