Stories from the Holbrook-Low Colonial Tree

From the Holbrook-Low Colonial Tree (trees/holbrook-low-colonial-tree.html, version of early October 2026), kept as written so nothing is lost when the tree page is retired. Short accounts that run across several ancestors. On the site they are the Small world page (connections/small-world.yaml).

People are given with their archive page ID in backticks. Tiers in brackets: [D] documented, [C] compiled, [I] inference, [T] tradition, [Q] unproven, [F] family record. "Frances" is Frances Fairchild Holbrook (b. 1931), from whom the tree is drawn.

Four men in one boat, 1620

On 6 December 1620, while the Mayflower lay at anchor in Cape Cod harbour, a party set out to explore the coast. Among them were John Tilley, his brother Edward, John Howland and Richard Warren. At dawn two days later they were attacked on the beach, the fight the Pilgrims called the "First Encounter." Three of those four men are Frances's ancestors.

John Tilley and his wife Joan Hurst died that first winter. Their daughter Elizabeth, about thirteen, survived, and later married John Howland, the young man who had been in the boat with her father. Richard Warren's wife and daughters came over on the Anne in 1623, and his daughter Mary married Robert Bartlett.

The Howland-Tilley family and the Warren family then went separate ways for five generations. They met again at Plympton on 23 May 1773, when George Ellis, a great-great-grandson of John and Elizabeth's son Isaac Howland, married Phebe Stephens, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Mary Warren and Robert Bartlett. As it happens, George and Phebe were also third cousins through another Plymouth couple, John Churchill and Hannah Pontus.

Their daughter Nancy Ellis was the mother of Capt. Richard B. Holbrook, Frances's great-grandfather. In her, the three men from that boat come together again.

People: John Tilley (John Tilley); Joan Hurst (Joan Hurst); Elizabeth Tilley (Elizabeth Tilley); John Howland (John Howland); Lt. Isaac Howland (Isaac Howland); Richard Warren (Richard Warren); Mary Warren (Mary Warren); Robert Bartlett (Robert Bartlett); George Ellis (George Ellis); Phebe Stephens (Phebe Stephens); Nancy Ellis (Nancy Ellis).

Famous kin mentioned: Edward Tilley.

Sources: Mourt's Relation (London, 1622); Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation; Plympton marriage record, 1773.

The governor, the dissenter and the suitor

Thomas Prence was governor of Plymouth Colony in 1634, in 1638, and again from 1657 until his death in 1673. Frances descends from him on the Holbrook side. His daughter Sarah married Jeremiah Howes of Yarmouth. Their daughter Sarah Howes married Daniel Mayo of Eastham, and their granddaughter Sarah Mayo married Elisha Holbrook in 1742. Elisha's son was Capt. Gideon Holbrook.

Edmund Freeman, the leading settler of Sandwich, and John Howland of the Mayflower come in on the Ellis side. Each was a great-great-great-great-grandfather of Nancy Ellis, by two different lines. Nancy married Gideon Holbrook at Plymouth in December 1818, and their son Richard B. Holbrook, Frances's great-grandfather, was in the first generation of the family to descend from all three men.

A century and a half before that wedding, the three were already tangled up together. Prence held Plymouth's hard line on religion; a Quaker writer, George Bishop, quotes him saying the Quakers "deserved to be destroyed." Freeman was the colony's best-known dissenter. In 1646 he lost his seat among the colony's Assistants, which Edward Winslow put down to "his professed Anabaptistry and separacion from the Churches," and in 1651 he and his wife were brought to court "for not frequenting the publick worship of God." Even so, two of Prence's daughters married two of Freeman's sons, Rebecca in 1646 and Mercy in 1650, and Prence left his books to his son-in-law John Freeman.

The Howlands gave the governor a different kind of trouble. In 1667 Prence's own court fined Arthur Howland Jr., John Howland's nephew, £5 "for inveigling of Mistris Elizabeth Prence" by courting her against her parents' wishes. Prence's will, six years later, names "my Daughter Elizabeth howland." She had married him after all.

One more knot: Prence's fourth wife, Mary, was the widow of Thomas Howes and the mother of Jeremiah Howes, the young man who married Prence's daughter Sarah. So both of Sarah Howes's grandfathers, Prence and Thomas Howes, are Frances's ancestors, and Prence was married to her other grandmother.

People: Gov. Thomas Prence (Thomas Prence); Sarah Prence (Sarah Prence); Jeremiah Howes (Jeremiah Howes); Thomas Howes (Thomas Howes); Sarah Howes (Sarah Howes); Daniel Mayo (Daniel Mayo); Sarah Mayo (Sarah Mayo); Deacon Elisha Holbrook (Elisha Holbrook); Capt. Gideon Holbrook (Gideon Holbrook); Edmund Freeman (Edmund Freeman); Elizabeth Freeman (Elizabeth Freeman); John Howland (John Howland); Nancy Ellis (Nancy Ellis); Capt. Richard Blackmer Holbrook (Richard Blackmer Holbrook).

Sources: Plymouth Colony Records 2:98, 2:173, 4:140, 8:27; Winthrop Papers 5:80-81; Bishop, New England Judged; Prence's will, Mayflower Descendant 3:203-209.

Three Holbrooks, three Pierces

Capt. John Holbrook of Weymouth and Capt. Michael Pierce of Hingham and later Scituate were militia captains in neighbouring towns on the south shore of Massachusetts Bay. Three of Holbrook's children married three of Pierce's.

In 1670 Holbrook's daughter Hannah married Pierce's son Ephraim. In 1671 his son John married Pierce's daughter Abigail; they are Frances's ancestors. And in 1675 his son Samuel married Pierce's daughter Mary. When Pierce made his will in January 1676, "being now by the appointment of God going out to war, against the Indians," he left "my daughter, Abigail Holbrook five pounds" and "my daughter Mary Holbrook, twenty pounds." Two months later he was killed.

The other two couples have famous descendants, according to the compiled family lines. Hannah and Ephraim are ancestors of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, and Samuel and Mary of President William Howard Taft. Because Frances descends from both captains, and so do those presidents, she is related to them through both families at once.

People: Capt. John Holbrook (John Holbrook); Elizabeth Stream (Elizabeth Stream); Capt. Michael Pierce (Michael Pierce); John Holbrook (John Holbrook); Abigail Pierce (Abigail Pierce).

Famous kin mentioned: George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, William Howard Taft.

Sources: Pierce Genealogy (Capt. Pierce's will of 1675/6); Weaver, History and Genealogy of a Branch of the Weaver Family (1928); WikiTree lines for the presidents.

The captain, the lieutenant and the press master

Frances's ancestor Capt. John Holbrook, born at Scituate in 1686, was the grandson of Capt. Michael Pierce through his mother, Abigail Pierce. His wife, Sarah Chittenden, was the granddaughter of two more Scituate men: Isaac Chittenden on her father's side and Lt. Isaac Buck on her mother's.

Those three older men served the town together. In 1669 Michael Pierce was made captain of Scituate's militia company and Isaac Buck its lieutenant. When King Philip's War broke out in 1675, Isaac Chittenden was one of Scituate's three "presse masters", the men who chose which townsmen would march. On 26 March 1676 Captain Pierce was killed near Pawtucket with most of his company, and Chittenden's own son Benjamin died with him. Two months later, when Scituate itself was attacked, "Lieut. Buck had mustered all the men below."

In 1679 Chittenden's son Stephen married Buck's daughter Mehitable. On 3 May 1709 their daughter Sarah married Pierce's grandson, John Holbrook. So the captain who fell at Pawtucket, his lieutenant, and the man who drafted the town's soldiers all became Frances's ancestors through that one wedding, thirty-three years after the battle.

One family history, the Nye genealogy of 1907, adds that Benjamin Nye Jr. of Sandwich also died with Pierce. His father, Benjamin Nye, is a probable, though unproven, ancestor on the Ellis side, and nothing else confirms the story.

People: Capt. John Holbrook (John Holbrook); Abigail Pierce (Abigail Pierce); Capt. Michael Pierce (Michael Pierce); Sarah Chittenden (Sarah Chittenden); Stephen Chittenden (Stephen Chittenden); Isaac Chittenden (Isaac Chittenden); Lt. Isaac Buck (Isaac Buck).

Sources: Deane, History of Scituate (1831); Plymouth Colony Records 5:183; Scituate vital records.

The Pontus sisters

William Pontus was a fustian-worker from near Dover who joined the English congregation in exile at Leiden. He married Wybra Hanson there on 4 December 1610, with William Brewster, the congregation's elder, as a witness. By 1633 the family was at Plymouth, where Pontus was a freeman, and they had two daughters, Mary and Hannah. Both are Frances's ancestors.

Hannah married John Churchill in 1644. Mary married James Glass in 1645; he drowned in 1652, and in 1654 she married Philip Delano, a son of Walloon Protestant refugees, who had grown up in Leiden and come to Plymouth on the Fortune in 1621. William Pontus died in 1653. He left Mary his house, and he had already given Hannah and John Churchill part of his meadow, on condition that John help fence it and "bee healpfull towards the maintainance of him whiles hee lived." In 1664 the court settled his share of land at Middleborough on the two sisters.

Then the sisters' children married each other. On 28 December 1686 Hannah's son John Churchill married Mary's daughter Rebecca Delano; they were first cousins. In 1694 Rebecca's brother Samuel Delano sold John his half of their grandfather's Middleborough share, so the old Pontus land came back together.

Rebecca and John's daughter Elizabeth Churchill married Joel Ellis, and Hannah's other son, Eleazer Churchill, is the ancestor of Phebe Stephens, who married Joel's grandson George Ellis. So William Pontus and Wybra Hanson are Frances's ancestors three times over. And Rebecca Delano's half-brother Jonathan is an ancestor of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ulysses S. Grant.

People: William Pontus (William Pontus); Wybra Hanson (Wybra Hanson); Hannah Pontus (Hannah Pontus); Mary Pontus (Mary Pontus); John Churchill (John Churchill); Philip Delano (Philip Delano); Sgt. John Churchill Jr. (John Churchill); Rebecca Delano (Rebecca Delano); Eleazer Churchill (Eleazer Churchill); Elizabeth Churchill (Elizabeth Churchill); Capt. Joel Ellis (Joel Ellis); Phebe Stephens (Phebe Stephens); George Ellis (George Ellis).

Famous kin mentioned: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant.

Sources: Leiden marriage record (via Anderson, The Great Migration Begins); Plymouth Colony Records; Mayflower Descendant 11:92-94, 249-252.

Grandfather Freeman and young Matthias

Edmund Freeman, the leading settler of Sandwich, was serving as an Assistant, one of the colony's magistrates, in 1645, when his daughter Elizabeth's marriage to John Ellis brought the couple before the court. On 4 June 1645 Ellis was sentenced to be whipped for "committing vncleanesse wth her before marryage," with "Elizabeth, his wyfe, to stand by whilst execucon of the sentence is pformed," and fined £5 more for being slow to confess.

The marriage lasted. John Ellis became lieutenant of the Sandwich company and kept an inn, and their son Matthias, born in 1657, went to live with his grandfather. In 1679 Freeman, then in his eighties, gave Matthias land "for and in consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to the said Matthias Ellis, being my kinsman in blood, that is to say my grandson; ... as living with me until he ... came unto man's estate, being a support unto me in my old age and weakness." The land ran along "a Ditch called the Divell's Ditch," under Sagamore Hill, near "a great Rock like the ridge of a house."

A Sandwich tradition says Freeman chose two boulders for graves, one shaped like a pillion for his wife and one like a saddle for himself, and that the first was "by oxen driven by Ellis ... hauled to the recent grave." The stones were given bronze tablets in 1910.

Matthias lived to 91. Every Ellis in Frances's line after him, from Joel down to Nancy, descends from the boy who grew up in his grandfather's house.

People: Edmund Freeman (Edmund Freeman); Elizabeth Freeman (Elizabeth Freeman); Lt. John Ellis (John Ellis); Lt. Matthias Ellis (Matthias Ellis); Capt. Joel Ellis (Joel Ellis); Nancy Ellis (Nancy Ellis).

Sources: Plymouth Colony Records 2:85-86; Freeman Genealogy (1875), pp. 21-22; Frederick Freeman, The History of Cape Cod.

The London backer

William Collier was one of the London merchant "adventurers" who put up the money for the Plymouth colony. Governor Bradford mentions him: the colony's agent Isaac Allerton "had cleared up 400li. and put it into a brew-house of Mr. Colliers in London." When the investors sold out to the Plymouth leaders in 1626, Collier signed the agreement, and in 1629/30 two of the London partners wrote of him, "account of him as a sure friend."

In 1633 he came over himself with his family and settled at Duxbury. His daughters married quickly: Sarah to Love Brewster, who had come on the Mayflower as a boy, and Rebecca to Job Cole, both in 1634, and Mary to Thomas Prence on 1 April 1635. Prence's first wife had been Patience Brewster, Elder William Brewster's daughter. Mary Collier and Thomas Prence are Frances's ancestors through their daughter Sarah Prence (see "The governor, the dissenter and the suitor").

Collier became one of the colony's Assistants, and he was as unbending as his son-in-law. In 1658 James Cudworth, who opposed the harsh laws against Quakers, complained that "Mr. Collier, last June, would not sit on the bench, if I sat there." When Collier died in 1671, the first-named administrator of his estate was the governor, Thomas Prence.

People: William Collier (William Collier); Mary Collier (Mary Collier); Gov. Thomas Prence (Thomas Prence); Sarah Prence (Sarah Prence).

Sources: Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation; Morton, New Englands Memoriall (1669); Plymouth Colony Records 1:30-31, 5:68; Bishop, New England Judged.

Thanksgiving at Barnstable, 1639

The Holbrooks came to New England in 1635 in a company led by the Rev. Joseph Hull, which sailed from Weymouth in Dorset. Thomas Holbrook, his wife Jane and their children are on the list made at Weymouth on 20 March 1634/5.

By 1639 Hull had moved to Barnstable, on Cape Cod. That December the Barnstable church kept a day of thanksgiving and, as its record says, "divided into three companies to feast together, some at Mr. Hull's, some at Mr. Mayo's, some at Brother Lombard's." Mr. Mayo was the Rev. John Mayo, another of Frances's ancestors, who later became the first pastor of Boston's Second Church and in 1664 laid his hands on the young Increase Mather at his ordination.

So the minister who led the Holbrooks across the Atlantic and Frances's ancestor Mayo hosted the same thanksgiving. A hundred and three years later, in 1742, Elisha Holbrook, a great-great-grandson of Thomas, married Sarah Mayo, a great-great-granddaughter of the Rev. John, at Eastham.

People: Thomas Holbrook (Thomas Holbrook); Jane Powyes (Jane Powyes); Rev. John Mayo (John Mayo); John Mayo (John Mayo); Deacon Elisha Holbrook (Elisha Holbrook); Sarah Mayo (Sarah Mayo).

Sources: NEHGR 25 (1871), p. 14 (Hull's company); Lothrop's Barnstable church record, quoted in Hawes; Robbins, History of the Second Church in Boston.

Four signatures on one petition

In 1637 Ipswich was a two-year-old town on the edge of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On 21 June the townsmen sent the governor a petition asking him not to take John Winthrop Jr. away to command the Castle in Boston harbour: "It was for his sake that many of vs came to this place." Four of the men who signed it are Frances's ancestors: John Cogswell, Robert Lord, Thomas Boreman and John Procter.

For the next fifty years their families kept turning up in one another's papers. In 1653 John Procter and William Varney took the inventory of John Cogswell Jr.'s estate, and the next year John Cogswell helped appraise Varney's. Varney's son Thomas married Procter's daughter Abigail, and in 1676 he gave evidence for William Cogswell in a family lawsuit. In 1669 Thomas Low was serving court papers as deputy to the town marshal, Robert Lord's son. And in 1692, when Abigail's brother John Proctor was jailed in the witch trials, Thomas Varney and Deacon Thomas Low both signed Ipswich's petition for him.

Then the families married. In 1733 Caleb Low, Thomas Boreman's great-grandson, married his second cousin Abigail Varney, a granddaughter of Thomas Varney and Abigail Procter and a great-granddaughter of William Cogswell. Their son Nathan married Lucy Lord, the marshal's great-granddaughter. Their son, Major Nathan Low, born in 1765, descended from all four men who had signed that petition 128 years before. He was the grandfather of Harriet Phillips Low.

People: John Cogswell (John Cogswell); Robert Lord (Robert Lord); Thomas Boreman (Thomas Boreman); John Proctor Sr. (John Proctor); William Varney (William Varney); Cpl. Thomas Varney (Thomas Varney); Abigail Proctor (Abigail Proctor); William Cogswell (William Cogswell); Deacon Thomas Low (Thomas Low); Robert Lord, marshal (Robert Lord); Caleb Low (Caleb Low); Abigail Varney (Abigail Varney); Nathan Low (Nathan Low); Lucy Lord (Lucy Lord); Major Nathan Low (Nathan Low); Harriet Phillips Low (Harriet Phillips Lowe).

Famous kin mentioned: John Proctor.

Sources: Winthrop Papers 3:432-433; Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County; Ipswich vital records; Salem Witchcraft Papers, no. 107.

Lucy Lord's grandfathers

Lucy Lord, born at Ipswich in 1747, was Harriet Phillips Low's great-grandmother. Three of her ancestors were already in one another's papers a century before she was born.

In 1653 Thomas Emerson of Ipswich made his will. He left his son James £40 "if he shall Come ouer into this Country (or send by a certayne surtifficate of his being liueing)," and left his daughter Elizabeth his "great carued chest." One of the two men who witnessed it was the town clerk, Robert Lord. Elizabeth Emerson had married John Fuller, who had crossed to New England at about fifteen. In 1657, when Fuller was in court over some hogs, a Thomas Low testified that Fuller's wife owned some of them.

Robert Lord was Lucy's great-great-grandfather, Thomas Emerson another, and John Fuller and Elizabeth Emerson were her great-grandparents. In 1765 Lucy married Nathan Low, a descendant of that Thomas Low. Their son was Major Nathan Low. And through Elizabeth's brother, the Rev. Joseph Emerson, the same Emerson family produced Ralph Waldo Emerson.

People: Lucy Lord (Lucy Lord); Thomas Emerson (Thomas Emerson); Elizabeth Emerson (Elizabeth Emerson); John Fuller (John Fuller); Robert Lord (Robert Lord); Thomas Low (Thomas Low); Deacon Thomas Low (Thomas Low); Nathan Low (Nathan Low); Major Nathan Low (Nathan Low).

Famous kin mentioned: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Sources: Probate Records of Essex County 2:34-37, 2:58-59; Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County 2:22; Ipswich and Boxford vital records.

Two Boston printers and a banished midwife

On 5 April 1722 Rachel Kneeland, aged sixteen, married Samuel Foster, a Boston periwig-maker. That wedding tied together three remarkable families.

Samuel's great-uncle was John Foster, who in 1675 took over a printing press and opened Boston's first printing office. The standard bibliography of early American printing lists his edition of an Increase Mather sermon as "The first book printed in Boston," and his 1677 woodcut map of New England as "the first cut in the United States." Samuel descended from John's brother, Ensign Hopestill Foster, and further back from Rachel Bigg, who crossed in 1635 at about seventy.

Rachel Kneeland's brother Samuel Kneeland became a leading Boston printer of the next generation. He printed the Boston Gazette, ran the firm of Kneeland & Green for twenty-five years, and was for many years printer to the governor and council. Isaiah Thomas says Kneeland & Green secretly printed the first Bible in English in America, under a false London imprint, though no copy has ever been found.

And the Kneelands' great-great-grandmother was Jane Hawkins of St Ives, who in 1629 dictated verse in a trance for "three days and three nights" to some two hundred people, and who later, as the midwife of Anne Hutchinson's circle in Boston, was banished from Massachusetts. Her son James was a Boston bricklayer, and so was Rachel and Samuel's father, John Kneeland, who learned the trade from his uncle, another James Hawkins.

People: Rachel Kneeland (Rachel Kneeland); Samuel Foster (Samuel Foster); Capt. Hopestill Foster (Hopestill Foster); Ensign Hopestill Foster (Hopestill Foster); Rachel Martin (Rachel Martin); John Kneeland (John Kneeland); Mary Hawkins (Mary Hawkins); James Hawkins (James Hawkins); Jane Hawkins (Jane Hawkins); John Kneeland (John Kneeland).

Famous kin mentioned: John Foster, Samuel Kneeland.

Sources: Boston marriages (Record Commissioners 28:106); Evans, American Bibliography, vol. 1; Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America; Winthrop's Journal; Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1628-29.

On the same ship

Several of Frances's ancestors from quite different branches crossed the Atlantic together, long before their families had anything to do with one another.

The Fortune, the second ship to reach Plymouth, in November 1621, carried Thomas Prence and William Bassett, both Holbrook-side ancestors, and Philip Delano of Leiden, an Ellis-side ancestor. Their lines finally joined when Gideon Holbrook married Nancy Ellis in 1818. In 1635 the Abigail brought Edmund Freeman and his family, later of Sandwich (Ellis side), and John Fuller, about fifteen, whose descendants lead to the Lows.

The Elizabeth left London on 17 April 1635 with a widow, Patience Foster, aged 40, her son Hopestill, 14, and her mother Rachel Bigg, who was about seventy though the clerk wrote her down as 6. Also aboard were James Bate with his daughter Marie, 17, and a man named Thomas Millett. The two teenagers, Hopestill Foster and Marie Bate, later married; one family historian says they were second cousins. Their line leads to Mary Foster and the Lows of Deer Isle.

Thomas Millett settled at Gloucester, where his daughter Mary married Thomas Riggs, and that line leads to Sally Ginn and the Tylers. In 1672 Millett took the inventory of a Gloucester widow named Bridget Varney, a Low-side ancestor. The Low line and the Tyler line joined in 1832, when Capt. Nathan Low of Deer Isle married Hannah Read Tyler.

People: Gov. Thomas Prence (Thomas Prence); William Bassett (William Bassett); Philip Delano (Philip Delano); Edmund Freeman (Edmund Freeman); John Fuller (John Fuller); Patience Bigg (Patience Bigg); Capt. Hopestill Foster (Hopestill Foster); Rachel Martin (Rachel Martin); James Bate (James Bate); Mary Bate (Mary Bate); Thomas Millett (Thomas Millett); Bridget (Bridget Varney); Capt. Nathan Low (nathan-low-1804); Hannah Read Tyler (Hannah Read Tyler).

Sources: Hotten, Original Lists of Persons of Quality (1874); Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation; Probate Records of Essex County.

The Gloucester town clerk

Thomas Riggs was very probably the son of a farmer at Hawkshead in Lancashire. On 3 February 1646/7 he was bound apprentice in London to a scrivener, a professional writer of documents, and the entry survives in the books of the Drapers' Company, the same archive now being searched for Richard Warren. By 1658 he was at Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he married Mary Millett, daughter of Thomas Millett, the lay preacher who had crossed on the Elizabeth in 1635.

The training showed. Riggs was Gloucester's town clerk for fifty-one years, from 1665 to 1716, and in old age the town's schoolmaster. He kept a pigskin notebook inscribed "Thomas Riggs, his Booke, 1656," with twelve pages of shorthand that no one has been able to read. In 1688 he and his brother-in-law Thomas Millett were fined for the town's refusal of one of Governor Andros's "odious taxes." Part of his squared-log house still stands at Annisquam.

In 1706 Riggs signed the inventory of his neighbour Sgt. John Stanwood, whose estate included "one Dwelling House very old and bad" and "one old Sloop." In 1735 Riggs's grandson Joshua married Stanwood's granddaughter Experience. Their daughter Ann Riggs married Capt. James Ginn, and Ann's daughter Sally Ginn, Harriet Phillips Low's grandmother, married Rowland Tyler.

People: Thomas Riggs Sr. (Thomas Riggs); Mary Millett (Mary Millett); Thomas Millett (Thomas Millett); Thomas Riggs Jr. (Thomas Riggs); Sgt. John Stanwood (John Stanwood); Joshua Riggs (Joshua Riggs); Experience Stanwood (Experience Stanwood); Ann Riggs (Ann Riggs); Capt. James Ginn (James Ginn); Sally Ginn (Sally Ginn); Rowland Tyler (Rowland Tyler).

Sources: Smith and Anderson, The American Genealogist 82 (2007): 120-129; Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester (1860); Bolton, The Stanwood Family (1899); Gloucester vital records.

The Dotys we don't descend from

Mollie believed the family descended from Edward Doty of the Mayflower. The records show it doesn't. The Dotys crossed the family's path all the same.

In the summer of 1674 Deborah Ellis, sister of Frances's ancestor Lt. Matthias Ellis of Sandwich, married Edward Doty's son Joseph. That October Joseph was bound over by the court, because Elizabeth Warren, a granddaughter of Richard Warren, named him as the father of her child. Richard Warren is also Frances's ancestor, so in a single year a Doty married into one ancestral family and was accused by a granddaughter of another.

A century and a half later, on 1 March 1819, a Gideon Holbrook, very probably Frances's ancestor Capt. Gideon Holbrook, signed as one of Plymouth's selectmen a complaint to the probate court that the sailmaker Edward Doten, a descendant of the Mayflower Doty, "by his excessive drinking" was wasting his estate. Three months earlier Gideon had married Nancy Ellis, a descendant of Deborah's brother Matthias.

People: Lt. Matthias Ellis (Matthias Ellis); Richard Warren (Richard Warren); Capt. Gideon Holbrook (Gideon Holbrook); Nancy Ellis (Nancy Ellis).

Sources: Plymouth Colony Records 5:156; Plymouth County Probate, 1819; The Doty-Doten Family in America (1897).

One war, every branch

King Philip's War, fought in 1675 and 1676, turns up in the records of every branch of the tree.

Four years before it began, in 1672, Philip himself wrote to Capt. Hopestill Foster of Dorchester, a Low-side ancestor, asking for "five yards of White light collored serge to make me a coat and a good holland shirt."

When the fighting came, ancestors on every side were drawn in. On the Tyler side, Samuel Tyler was impressed at Rowley in November 1675 for the Narragansett campaign, and John Stanwood was in garrison at Lancaster that winter. On the Ellis side, Lt. John Ellis called the Sandwich town meeting of February 1676 that let families move into the town garrison. On the Holbrook side, Jeremiah Howes sat on Yarmouth's council of war, Capt. Michael Pierce was killed near Pawtucket in March, and in April Capt. John Holbrook marched a company out of Concord with "neither Drume nor Collors." That same April, at Sudbury, Thomas Hawley, the second husband of Low-side ancestor Dorothy Harbottle, was killed.

In the summer of 1676, during a raid on Philip's people, Benjamin Church "sent Mr. Isaac Howland with a party on one side of the swamp" while he went round the other. Church was a grandson of Richard Warren, and Isaac Howland is Frances's ancestor; the Warren and Howland lines are the ones that came together a century later in George Ellis and Phebe Stephens.

People: Capt. Hopestill Foster (Hopestill Foster); Samuel Tyler (Samuel Tyler); Sgt. John Stanwood (John Stanwood); Lt. John Ellis (John Ellis); Jeremiah Howes (Jeremiah Howes); Capt. Michael Pierce (Michael Pierce); Capt. John Holbrook (John Holbrook); Dorothy Harbottle (Dorothy Harbottle); Lt. Isaac Howland (Isaac Howland).

Famous kin mentioned: Benjamin Church.

Sources: Church, Entertaining Passages relating to Philip's War (1716); Bodge, Soldiers in King Philip's War (1906); Deane, History of Scituate (1831).

1692, from two sides

The witchcraft trials of 1692 reached two different branches of the tree.

On the Low side, John Proctor, brother of Frances's ancestor Abigail (Proctor) Varney, was jailed in April, condemned on 5 August and hanged at Salem on 19 August. Two of the men who signed the Ipswich petition for him were Frances's ancestors: Abigail's husband, Cpl. Thomas Varney, and Deacon Thomas Low. Thomas Varney died that December.

On the Tyler side, the accusations reached Job Tyler's family at Andover that summer. His granddaughter Mary Post was accused on 2 August, and so were her mother, her twelve-year-old half-sister, and her uncle Hopestill Tyler's wife and two daughters. Mary Post was tried in January 1693 and found guilty, one of only three convicted at that sitting, and the governor reprieved her.

In 1711 the General Court reversed the convictions by name, John Proctor's and Mary Post's among them. The two families' lines joined in 1832, when Capt. Nathan Low, a Varney and Low descendant, married Hannah Read Tyler, a descendant of Job Tyler.

People: Abigail Proctor (Abigail Proctor); Cpl. Thomas Varney (Thomas Varney); Deacon Thomas Low (Thomas Low); Job Tyler (Job Tyler); Capt. Nathan Low (nathan-low-1804); Hannah Read Tyler (Hannah Read Tyler).

Famous kin mentioned: John Proctor, Mary Post.

Sources: Salem Witchcraft Papers, nos. 102, 107, 170, 173; Brigham, The Tyler Genealogy (1912).

Three towns and Governor Andros

In 1686 the New England colonies were put under a single royal governor, Sir Edmund Andros, who raised taxes without an elected assembly. Three branches of Frances's family met his government in three different ways.

At Chebacco, Rev. John Wise, brother of two Low-side ancestors, Mary and Abigail Wise, led Ipswich's refusal of an Andros tax in 1687 and was jailed for it. At Gloucester, Thomas Riggs, a Tyler-side ancestor, and his brother-in-law Thomas Millett were fined in 1688 for their town's refusal of one of Andros's "odious taxes." And at Scituate the town clerk was Lt. Isaac Buck of the Holbrook side: in January 1687 his signature, "per me Isaac Buck, Town Clerk," certified an Andros order read at town meeting.

Andros was overthrown at Boston in April 1689.

People: Lt. Isaac Buck (Isaac Buck); Thomas Riggs Sr. (Thomas Riggs); Mary Wise (Mary Wise); Abigail Wise (Abigail Wise).

Famous kin mentioned: Rev. John Wise.

Sources: Deane, History of Scituate (1831), p. 105; Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester (1860); Jameson, The Cogswells in America (1884).

Autumn 1775 in Attleborough

In the autumn of 1775, a few months after Lexington, two Attleborough households, one family, buried six people in three weeks. The town record gives no cause.

Capt. Daniel Read lost his son David on 12 September, his son Ezra, aged fifteen, on 21 September, and his wife Mary on 23 September. His daughter Hannah was married to Ebenezer Tyler, who had marched with the minute men that April. Hannah and Ebenezer lost their small son Leander on 26 September, and two more sons, Rowland and Habijah, both on 1 October. Within three weeks Hannah had lost her mother, two brothers and three of her children.

In 1780 Hannah and Ebenezer had twin sons and gave them the names of the two boys who had died on 1 October, Rowland and Abijah. That second Rowland Tyler grew up to build the church at Dixmont Corner in Maine, and was the grandfather of Harriet Phillips Low.

People: Capt. Daniel Read (Daniel Read); Hannah White Read (Hannah Read); Col. Ebenezer Tyler (Ebenezer Tyler); Rowland Tyler (Rowland Tyler); Hannah Read Tyler (Hannah Read Tyler); Harriet Phillips Low (Harriet Phillips Lowe).

Sources: Attleborough vital records (deaths); Brigham, The Tyler Genealogy (1912); Lothrop, The Nicholas White Family (1902).

Two men on the Rhode Island alarm

On 8 December 1776 British troops landed at Newport, Rhode Island, and the militia of southeastern Massachusetts was called out. Two of Frances's ancestors answered the alarm.

Ebenezer Tyler of Attleborough marched to Rhode Island as a sergeant in Capt. Jacob Ide's company and served seventeen days. George Ellis of Plymouth marched to Bristol, Rhode Island, on 11 December in Capt. Robert Finney's company and served ten days. (Several men named George Ellis served in the war; the Plymouth company fits ours best.) Whether the two ever met is not recorded.

Eighty-four years later, on 24 December 1860, at Steilacoom in Washington Territory, George Ellis's grandson Richard B. Holbrook married Ebenezer Tyler's great-granddaughter Harriet Phillips Low.

People: Col. Ebenezer Tyler (Ebenezer Tyler); George Ellis (George Ellis); Nancy Ellis (Nancy Ellis); Capt. Richard Blackmer Holbrook (Richard Blackmer Holbrook); Rowland Tyler (Rowland Tyler); Hannah Read Tyler (Hannah Read Tyler); Harriet Phillips Low (Harriet Phillips Lowe).

Sources: Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, vols. 5 and 16; Hurd, History of Plymouth County (1884).

Raising churches on the Penobscot

Capt. James Ginn came to Maine by way of Maryland and Gloucester. On the Penobscot he ran a mill at Orland and built a brig and two schooners there, and in 1800 he moved to Bucksport, where he built a wharf, a store and, in 1803, the town's great house. On 12 May 1803 the Bucksport church was gathered in that house while it was still unfinished: "a temporary pulpit and seats were fitted up for the occasion," and so many people came from nearby towns that they had trouble finding places to sleep.

The next year, on 28 March 1804, his daughter Sally married Rowland Tyler, a schoolteacher from Attleborough who had come to the Penobscot in 1796. Rowland went on to design and build the church at Dixmont Corner, now on the National Register of Historic Places as one of the earliest carpenter-gothic buildings in the region.

The two families were already linked: Sally's sister Anna had married Josiah Brewer, and Josiah's sister Lavinia had married Rowland's brother Ebenezer. Sally and Rowland's daughter Hannah Read Tyler was Harriet Phillips Low's mother.

People: Capt. James Ginn (James Ginn); Ann Riggs (Ann Riggs); Sally Ginn (Sally Ginn); Rowland Tyler (Rowland Tyler); Hannah Read Tyler (Hannah Read Tyler).

Sources: Bangor Historical Magazine, vols. 1 and 4; National Register nomination, Dixmont Corner Church (1983); Brigham, The Tyler Genealogy (1912).

When cousins married

In small colonial towns people often married relatives, and the tree shows it. When two cousins marry, the ancestors they share turn up twice; the second time, their box in the tree is drawn with a dashed border.

Some examples: at Plymouth in 1686 John Churchill married his first cousin Rebecca Delano (see "The Pontus sisters"); at Plymouth in 1715 William Harlow married his second cousin Mercy Rider; at Chebacco in 1733 Caleb Low married his second cousin Abigail Varney; and at Plympton in 1773 George Ellis married Phebe Stephens, his third cousin, both of them great-great-grandchildren of John Churchill and Hannah Pontus.

People: Sgt. John Churchill Jr. (John Churchill); Rebecca Delano (Rebecca Delano); William Harlow (William Harlow); Mercy Rider (Mercy Rider); Caleb Low (Caleb Low); Abigail Varney (Abigail Varney); George Ellis (George Ellis); Phebe Stephens (Phebe Stephens); John Churchill (John Churchill); Hannah Pontus (Hannah Pontus).

Sources: Plymouth, Ipswich and Plympton vital records.