William Holbrook

Baptized at St John's, Glastonbury, on 12 June 1620, a son of Thomas Holbrook and brother of Capt. John Holbrook. He was made a freeman in 1647 and lived at Weymouth. Before 1655 he married Elizabeth (Pitts, as Vinton has it), who died in 1701; their children include William (1657/8-1714) and Cornelius (1662-1742).

Mendon and King Philip's War. He moved on to Mendon. When the war broke out, allotments there had been made to no new grantee "except to William Holbrook, who did not remove to the town until 1669" (Metcalf, Annals of Mendon, p. 9), and on 1 Jan 1673 "Dea. William Holbrook" was chosen a selectman (p. 56). Mendon was the first Massachusetts town struck: on 14 July 1675 Nipmuc men killed five or six people at work in their fields, and "within a little Time after they forsook the Place, abandoning their Houses to the Fury of the Enemy" (Hubbard, Narrative, Drake's ed. 1:86-87); the empty town was burned that winter (Metcalf p. 62). He is among the owners of lots "at the breaking out of the war" and among "those who returned after the war" (pp. 76-77), as are Job Tyler and his son Hopestill Tyler, though the man who returned may have been his son William.

He sold Mendon lands to his brother Thomas. He was later of Scituate, where he went perhaps in the flight of 1675, and died there, by Weaver's date, on 3 July 1699.

Open questions

• When he moved from Mendon to Scituate, and whether the William Holbrook who returned to Mendon was he or his son.
• When he came to Mendon: about 1662, as the Holbrook notes have it, or 1669 (Metcalf).