Cock and Feke

1548–1777

The line in brief

In July 1648 Theophilus Eaton wrote from New Haven that William Hallett and “she that was mr. Feakes his wife” had, “in a secret underhand way,” taken the children, two cows and all the household goods and gone away by water, and that “the children went (if not naked) very vnsatisfyingly apparraled.” One of the children was John Feke. His mother was Elizabeth Fones, the daughter of Thomas Fones, a London apothecary, and of Anne Winthrop, the sister of John Winthrop, governor of Massachusetts Bay. She had married her cousin, the governor’s son Henry, in 1629, and he was drowned at Salem in July 1630, the day after he landed: “My son Henry! my son Henry! ah, poor child!” the governor wrote to his wife. “Yet it grieves me much more for my dear daughter.” She came over on the Lyon in 1631 and within weeks had married Lieut. Robert Feake of Watertown, who with Daniel Patrick bought the lands that became Greenwich in 1640, one neck of them her own “peticaler perchase.” Feake lost his reason, sailed for England in 1647 and died at Watertown in 1661/2; she lived on with Hallett at Hell Gate, Flushing and Newtown, on Long Island, where several of her children became Friends. She is the heroine of Anya Seton’s The Winthrop Woman.

John Feke settled at Killingworth on Matinecock, by Oyster Bay, on part of the tract his brother-in-law Capt. John Underhill had from the Indians, “on which Feke built and reared a family of considerable note.” In 1672 he and Samuel Andrews contracted to build the Friends’ meeting house at Oyster Bay, to be paid in “wheat, pease, Indian-corn and porke,” and the next year he married Elizabeth Prior, daughter of Matthew Prior, one of the purchasers of Killingworth, in whose house, as in theirs, Friends met. When he died in 1724 the Friends recorded him as “an Ancient friend of Matinecock.” Their son Robert was the father of Robert Feke, the portrait painter of Newport. Their daughter Hannah married James Cock at Matinecock in December 1698, with the travelling minister Thomas Chalkley as a witness, who wrote of the Ranters who disturbed the meeting there: “I may say as the apostle Paul (only altering Ephesus to Matinicock, I fought with beasts there.”

James was the son of James Cock, whose origin is not known. At Southold by 1648, the elder James moved west with Captain Underhill and William Frost to Setauket, and on 29 May 1669 the Indian proprietors of Matinecock sold “unto Jeames Coke of Oyster bay” a tract beside Matthew Prior’s, with “fishing and foulleing, hookeing, huntting and Minneralls.” Friends’ meetings were held in his house, and the deed stayed in the family, which still farmed the land in 1912 after “eight generations of the Cock name.” His son James had the land south of Musketa Cove path, later the Piping Rock Farm, and later bought the Birdsall homestead at Buckram, now Locust Valley, where Mary, the youngest of his ten children with Hannah Feke, was born in August 1722, when her mother was forty-six. In March 1737/8 Mary was licensed to marry Isaac Frost, her second cousin through Matthew Prior and kin again through the Feakes; her brother Josiah married Isaac’s sister Rebecca, and her sister Martha his cousin Joseph Frost. In 1763 Isaac and Mary sold their farm at Mill River Neck and moved to Crom Pond in Cortlandt Manor and then to a farm at Crum Elbow in Clinton, Dutchess County, where she died after 1777. Their son George married Sarah Underhill in 1781.

Where it went

  1. On the Lyon1604/5LondonAnne Winthrop
  2. 1631Watertown, MassachusettsElizabeth Fones
  3. 1640Greenwich, ConnecticutRobert Feake
  4. 1648Southold, Long IslandJames Cock
  5. From Mill River Neck, Oyster Bay1669Matinecock, Oyster Bay, Long IslandJames Cock
  6. 1763Crom Pond, Cortlandt Manor, New YorkMary Cock

Six generations

The Cock name, three generations

  1. 2James Cock d. 1699Founder of the Cocks of Matinecock (Buckram, now Locust Valley), Oyster Bay, Long Island, whose origin is unknown.
  2. 1James Cock 1674–1728The second James Cock of Matinecock, Oyster Bay, Long Island, son of James and Sarah Cock, from whom he inherited the land later called the Piping Rock Farm.
  3. 0Mary Cock 1722–aft. 1777Probably the daughter of James Cock and Hannah Feke, at whose wedding in 1698 the travelling Quaker minister Thomas Chalkley was a witness; through the Feakes she descended from Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones.

The line down the left is drawn as the tree draws it: solid where a record shows the link to the parent above, dashed where it rests on compiled accounts, dotted where it is reasoned from the evidence, grey where it is only possible. A bar fades where a birth or death year isn't known.

Everyone in the line, 15 people

Notable ancestors and small world

1 notable ancestor in the line

  • Elizabeth Fones

    Governor Winthrop's niece and daughter-in-law, twice widowed or abandoned, the heroine of Anya Seton's The Winthrop Woman

With the famous kin, on Notable connections →

Still being worked on

Open questions

  • James Cock’s origin and age, and his wife Sarah’s maiden name (Clarke?).
  • John Feke’s birth year, and the year of his marriage, 1670 or 1673.
  • Robert Feake’s parents (Anderson’s Great Migration Begins; the Feake will cited in NYGBR 86:209), and whether he came back from England.
  • Elizabeth Fones’s death, and her marriage to Henry Winthrop in 1629 (Winthrop Papers, vol. 2).
  • Whether Elizabeth Fones had children by William Hallett.
For the record: the line at a glance and how sure it is

The line at a glance

James Cock (d. 1699), of Southold, Setauket and Matinecock = Sarah (d. 1715) > James Cock (1674-1728), of Matinecock and Buckram = Hannah Feke (1675-1750) > Mary Cock (1722-aft. 1777) = Isaac Frost (1717-aft. 1798), of Mill River Neck and Dutchess County > George Frost (1760-1830), of Creek and Rensselaerville.

The Fekes and Winthrops: Adam Winthrop (1548-1623), of Groton Manor = Anne Browne (d. 1629) > Anne Winthrop (1585/6-1618 or 1619) = Thomas Fones (d. 1629), London apothecary > Elizabeth Fones (1609/10-bef. 1674) = Lieut. Robert Feake (d. 1661/2), of Watertown and Greenwich > John Feke (b. c. 1638-39, d. 1724), of Killingworth = Elizabeth Prior (1656-1701/2), daughter of Matthew Prior of Killingworth and Mary > Hannah Feke, above.

The scope walks every ancestor of Mary Cock. Her husband’s side is the Frost and Fairchild line, which stops at her. Matthew Prior and his wife Mary, Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones, and the Foneses and Winthrops above them stand also in the Prior and Bowne line, the line of Isaac Frost’s mother, Hannah Prior: her father John Prior was Elizabeth (Prior) Feke’s brother, and her mother Elizabeth Bowne the daughter of John Feke’s sister Hannah. The Feakes and Winthrops stand in the Underhill line as well. So Mary and Isaac were second cousins through Matthew Prior, and second cousins once removed through Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones.

How sure it is

  • Mary to James Cock and Hannah Feke (compiled, probable): “29 Mary, b. 5/6 mo. (Aug.) 1722; m. Isaac Frost,” the last of their children in the Cock genealogy (1914, p. 17), and the Frost Genealogy: “License to marry granted March 3, 1738, to Mary, daughter of James and Hannah (Feke) Cock” (p. 31). The licence itself is in New York Marriage Licenses previous to 1784 (documented, probable). The Quaker 6th month, before 1752, is August; the Frost Genealogy’s “June 5” misreads it.
  • James Cock (1674) to James Cock and Sarah (documented, proven): the Friends’ register of “The children of James and Sarah Cock, borne Killingworth”: “8 James Cock was borne ye 4th of ye 2d Mo., 1674”; and his father’s will of 23 July 1699: “I give to my son James Cock all my land lying on ye South side of Musketa Cove path” (Oyster Bay Book C, p. 19, transcribed in the Cock genealogy, pp. 11-13). His marriage to Hannah Feke on the 1st of the 10th month (December) 1698 is documented and probable: the certificate survives and is pictured in the Cock genealogy. The Frost Genealogy’s “Oct. 1, 1698” misreads the month.
  • Hannah Feke to John Feke and Elizabeth Prior (compiled, probable): “dau. of John & Elizabeth (Priar) Feke of Killingworth,” second in the list of John Feke’s children (Cock genealogy, pp. 17, 288), from the Friends’ records; her sister Mary’s marriage minute of 1699 names “Mary Feakes, Daughter of John & Elizabeth Feakes.”
  • John Feke to Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones (compiled, probable): the Cock genealogy, the Frost Genealogy and Poland’s Robert Feke (1907). The best evidence is the conveyances he and his brother Robert made in 1660 and 1669 “to ‘our brother John Bowne,’” the husband of Hannah Feake. Captain Underhill, the husband of Elizabeth Feake, called him his young brother-in-law, and in 1693 David Underhill conveyed land to “his uncle and nearest neighbor, John Feke.” His birth, “about 1638-39,” is possible only.
  • John Feke’s marriage to Elizabeth Prior (compiled, probable): the 15th of the 7th month 1673, “according to Friends Record” (Cock genealogy, p. 287). The Frost Genealogy has 1670; their first child was born in 1674, which favours 1673.
  • Elizabeth Prior to Matthew Prior and Mary (compiled, probable): “dau. of Matthew Priar and Mary his wife, of Brookhaven, Oyster Bay and Killingworth,” among his children “as shown by Friends’ Record in New York” (Cock genealogy, pp. 287, 290-291); the Frost Genealogy agrees.
  • Robert Feake’s marriage to Elizabeth Fones (documented, proven): Winthrop’s journal, 27 Jan 1631/2, names “Mount Feake, from one Robert Feake, who had married the governor’s daughter-in-law.”
  • Elizabeth Fones to Thomas Fones and Anne Winthrop (documented, probable): Adam Winthrop’s diary records Anne’s marriage in February 1604/5 and the birth of “her seconde daughter” on 21 Jan 1609/10 (Winthrop Papers 1:88, 104); that this daughter was Elizabeth is the Frost Genealogy’s. The governor called her “my dear daughter,” and John Winthrop Jr. endorsed her letter “Sister Feakes.”
  • Anne Winthrop to Adam Winthrop (documented, proven): his diary, “my daughter Anne.” Anne Browne as her mother is compiled and probable (the Frost Genealogy).

Nothing is known above James Cock and his wife Sarah: “Nothing is known regarding the ancestral relations” of either, the compilers wrote, and their later thought that Sarah was “probably” a Clarke, sister of Samuel Clarke of North Sea, Southampton, is possible only. A family tradition that James landed at Bermuda after a swordfish holed his ship, and the compilers’ derivation of “Buckram” from Buckenham in Norfolk, are not evidence. Robert Feake’s parents are not known either: Henry F. Waters thought he belonged to the family of William Feake, goldsmith of London, and the Winthrop Papers’ editors call Tobias Feake, the schout of Flushing who delivered the Flushing Remonstrance in 1657, his nephew. Adam Winthrop’s own parents and Anne Browne’s father come from the Frost Genealogy alone. The Long Island compilers (Josephine C. Frost, and George W. Cocks and John Cox Jr.) were one small circle who shared notes, but they quote the Friends’ registers, the town books and the wills.

Set aside: the burial at Norwich, England, in 1776 that FamilySearch attaches to Mary; the Frost Genealogy’s Fones pedigree “of Saxby.” The research is in research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md, sections 1.C and 1.D.

Their families and the files

+ 5 husbands, wives and children

Research filesresearch/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.mdresearch/mcmillan/McMillan_Frost_Master_Research.md

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