Underhill

1548–1834

The line in brief

In 1637, with John Mason, Capt. John Underhill led the attack on the Pequot fort at Mystic. “Captain Mason entering into a wigwam, brought out a firebrand … Then he set fire on the west side, where he entered; myself set fire on the south end with a train of powder,” he wrote the next year; “We had sufficient light from the word of God for our proceedings.” He had been a cadet in the Prince of Orange’s guard and had married Heylken de Hooch at The Hague in 1628, and Winthrop brought him over in 1630 as one of the colony’s first paid officers. Disarmed in 1637 for signing the petition for John Wheelwright, and banished the next year, he went into the Dutch service, was one of the Eight Men of New Amsterdam and sheriff of Flushing, and in 1653 seized the Dutch fort at Hartford for Rhode Island. After Heylken died at Southold in 1658 he married Elizabeth Feake, the eldest daughter of Lieut. Robert Feake of Watertown and Greenwich and of Elizabeth Fones, the niece and widowed daughter-in-law of Governor John Winthrop. About 1661 they came to Oyster Bay, to the land at Matinecock the Indians gave him, which he named Killingworth; his will asked “that ye Children be not wronged,” and he died there in September 1672, five months after the birth of his youngest son, David.

David Underhill, probably a blacksmith, traded land around Oyster Bay in the 1690s, conveyed his share of his father’s land to “his uncle and nearest neighbor, John Feke,” and died in 1708. Benjamin Underhill, a Quaker of the Westbury meeting, was perhaps his son. In 1728 Benjamin married Hannah Townsend, probably the daughter of Thomas Townsend, who held land on Long Island and in Westchester and died at Concord, Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1732. Benjamin “acknowledged too much strong drink” in 1738, and in 1740 the meeting disowned him for it; Hannah took the children to the Purchase meeting in Westchester County. Their son Thomas, born in 1735, a Quaker farmer of Purchase and later of Nine Partners, in Clinton, Dutchess County, married Mercy Dickinson, probably the eldest child of Zebulon Dickinson and Joyce Hance, who had married at Shrewsbury, New Jersey, in 1733 and settled at North Castle; his brother John married her sister Deborah. Thomas and Mercy had nine children.

Their daughter Sarah, born in April 1761, married George Frost, a Quaker farmer, son of Isaac Frost and Mary Cock, by Friends’ ceremony at the Creek Meeting House in December 1781, in the middle of the Revolution. When her father made his will at Nine Partners in 1800 he named his “daughters Sarah, Easter, Mary, Elizabeth.” George and Sarah had eleven children; in 1805 George moved up the Hudson to the Coeymans meeting, near Rensselaerville, where he lived out his life, and their son George went west to Wisconsin. Sarah died in 1834. Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones, with the Foneses and Winthrops behind them, stand in the Cock and Feke and the Prior and Bowne lines as well, for George Frost descended from them twice.

Where it went

  1. Brought over by Winthrop1628The Hague, HollandJohn Underhill
  2. 1630BostonJohn Underhill
  3. c. 1661Matinecock, Oyster Bay, Long IslandJohn Underhill
  4. 1728Westbury, Long IslandBenjamin Underhill
  5. by 1755Purchase, Westchester County, New YorkThomas Underhill
  6. 1781Creek Meeting House, Dutchess County, New YorkSarah Underhill

Eight generations

The Underhill name, five generations

  1. 4John Underhill c. 1597–1672Capt. John Underhill, the soldier of the Pequot War, who with John Mason burned the Pequot fort at Mystic in 1637.
  2. 3David Underhill 1672–1708Probably the youngest child of Capt. John Underhill, the soldier of the Pequot War, and Elizabeth Feake, born in April 1672, months before his father died.
  3. 2Benjamin Underhill A Quaker of Westbury Meeting on Long Island, who married Hannah Townsend in 1728 and was disowned in 1740 for strong drink; his wife and children later moved to the Purchase Meeting in Westchester.
  4. 1Thomas Underhill 1735–1800Quaker farmer of the Purchase Meeting in Westchester County, New York, and later of Nine Partners, in Clinton, Dutchess County, where he died about 1801.
  5. 0Sarah Underhill 1761–1834Wife of George Frost (1760), whom she married at the Creek Meeting House in Dutchess County, New York, in 1781, and probably the mother of George Frost (1791).

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, 16 people

Notable ancestors and small world

2 notable ancestors 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

  • John Underhill

    Captain of the Massachusetts militia in the Pequot War, banished in the Antinomian crisis, and afterwards in the Dutch service; a possible ancestor

With the famous kin, on Notable connections →

Still being worked on

Open questions

  • Benjamin Underhill’s father: the Westbury Friends’ marriage of the 29th of the 3rd month 1728.
  • Benjamin’s birth and death.
  • Thomas Underhill’s marriage to Mercy Dickinson, and where he was born.
  • Mercy’s birth and her parents’ wedding, “March 5, 1733”: the Purchase or Shrewsbury Friends’ records.
  • Which Thomas Townsend was Hannah’s father, and whether his wife Sarah was her mother.
  • Zebulon Dickinson’s parents, and where he lived between Shrewsbury and North Castle.
  • David Underhill’s wives, and his children other than Peter.
For the record: the line at a glance and how sure it is

The line at a glance

Capt. John Underhill (c. 1597-1672), of the Pequot War and Killingworth = Elizabeth Feake (c. 1633-bef. 1675) > David Underhill (1672-1708), of Oyster Bay > Benjamin Underhill [?] (m. 1728), of Westbury = Hannah Townsend, daughter of Thomas Townsend (d. 1732) of Concord, Pennsylvania > Thomas Underhill (1735-c. 1801), of Purchase and Nine Partners = Mercy Dickinson (1733-aft. 1801), daughter of Zebulon Dickinson of North Castle and Joyce Hance > Sarah Underhill (1761-1834) = George Frost (1760-1830), of Creek and Rensselaerville > George Frost (1791-1860), of Rensselaerville and Heart Prairie.

The Feakes 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 > Elizabeth Feake, above.

The scope walks every ancestor of Sarah Underhill. Her husband’s side is the Frost and Fairchild line, which stops at her. Everything above Benjamin Underhill rests on one possible link. Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones, and the Foneses and Winthrops above them, stand also in the Cock and Feke line, through their son John Feke, and in the Prior and Bowne line, through their daughter Hannah (Feake) Bowne; George Frost descended from them by both. If the Underhill descent holds, he and Sarah were third cousins once removed.

How sure it is

  • Sarah to Thomas Underhill (documented, proven): his will of the 15th of the 10th month 1800 names “daughters Sarah, Easter, Mary, Elizabeth,” and her sister Deborah’s will of 1801 names “sisters, Sarah Frost, Esther Cornell, Mary Halsted and Elizabeth Titus” (abstracts in the Underhill Genealogy 2:138-139). Her birth, “6, 4, 1761,” is from the Purchase Friends’ records as the book takes them; after 1752 the 4th month is April.
  • Sarah to Mercy Dickinson (compiled, probable): the Underhill Genealogy. Thomas’s will calls his wife “Mary,” and no record of their marriage was found; it is not in the Purchase marriages of 1742-1785.
  • Sarah’s marriage to George Frost (compiled, probable): the Frost Genealogy and the Underhill Genealogy, 26 Dec 1781 at the Creek Meeting House, from the Nine Partners records.
  • Thomas to Benjamin Underhill and Hannah Townsend (compiled, probable): the Underhill Genealogy, which cites no record of his birth. The Purchase records bear it out: in 1771 “John Underhill, of New Castle, son of Benjamin” married Deborah Dickinson, the sister of Thomas’s wife, and “Elizabeth Hill … daughter of Benjamin Underhill” married David Tuthill; and in 1763 Benjamin’s wife Hannah took a certificate from Westbury to Purchase, “having removed there some years ago.”
  • Benjamin’s marriage to Hannah Townsend (documented, proven): the Westbury Friends’ records, with intentions on the 27th of the 1st month and the 24th of the 2nd month 1728, “accomplished, 29, 3, 1728.”
  • Hannah to Thomas Townsend (documented, probable): his will of 1732 names “his daughter, Hannah Underhill,” with land on Long Island and in Westchester. That this Hannah Underhill was Benjamin’s wife rests on the name and the land. Her mother, Thomas’s wife Sarah, is possible, and the Underhill Genealogy’s “Pearsall” is not shown.
  • Mercy to Zebulon Dickinson and Joyce Hance (compiled, probable): the Underhill Genealogy; her sisters Hannah (1764) and Deborah (1771) married at Purchase as daughters of Zebulon, of North Castle. The book’s dates for her parents’ wedding, “March 5, 1733,” and for her birth, the 20th of the 6th month (August) 1733, are hard to fit together.
  • Benjamin to David Underhill (compiled, possible), the weakest link and the one everything above rests on. No record names Benjamin’s father. The Underhill Genealogy places him as David’s son on George W. Cocks’s reasoning: “Our knowledge of names of David Underhill’s children is alike, indirect and fragmentary. The Deed of Gift before mentioned certainly fixes Peter as one of them and the appearance on the Oyster Bay records of the names of Benjamin and Samuel Underhill as property holders in the vicinity of Peter’s grant, and the certainty that Benjamin and Samuel were not the descendants of John places them as children of David” (2:77-78). David’s two wives are theories as well: the first “supposed” a Wright, the second, “my now wife Hannah” of his deed of 1700, a Forman by a theory “evolved” from “this slight clue.” The ruling of 8 Oct 2026 (research/decisions.md) brought the generations above in as pages with this step labelled possible. The Westbury Friends’ certificate of Benjamin’s marriage may name his parents.
  • David to Capt. John Underhill and Elizabeth Feake (documented, probable): “born 2nd month, 1672, as per the Friends’ records of Flushing, L. I., which state no day,” the last of the children of the second marriage (Underhill Genealogy 2:4, 2:74); and his conveyance of 1693 to John Feke of “all of my part and share in land formerly my father’s.”
  • Elizabeth Feake to Robert Feake and Elizabeth Fones (compiled, probable): first of Robert Feake’s children in the Cock genealogy (1914) and the Frost Genealogy. Her husband’s will of 1671 calls John Bowne, Hannah Feake’s husband, “my Brother John Bound” (Oyster Bay Town Records 1:78), and Captain Underhill called John Feke his young brother-in-law. Their marriage is compiled and probable: “Before January, 1659, he had married the second time.”
  • Elizabeth Fones to Thomas Fones and Anne Winthrop (documented, probable): Adam Winthrop’s diary records Anne’s marriage to Thomas Fones 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. “Sister Feakes.” Her marriage to Robert Feake is documented and proven: Winthrop’s journal names “Mount Feake, from one Robert Feake, who had married the governor’s daughter-in-law,” on 27 Jan 1631/2.
  • Anne Winthrop to Adam Winthrop (documented, proven): his diary, “my daughter Anne.” Anne Browne as her mother is compiled and probable (the Frost Genealogy).

Beyond the line’s pages, Capt. John Underhill’s parents (John Underhill and Honor (Leonora) Pawley), Adam Winthrop’s (Adam Winthrop the clothworker and Agnes Sharpe) and Anne Browne’s father (Henry Browne of Edwardstone) come from the compiled books 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, and many of their quotations can be checked in print.

Set aside: the Frost Genealogy’s 6 May 1761 for Sarah’s birth; the Cock genealogy’s “Sir John and Mary (Mosely) Underhill” as the Captain’s parents, and its “m. prob. Flushing, 1649” for his second marriage, nine years before his first wife died; the Fones pedigree “of Saxby.” Thomas Underhill is not the Thomas Underhill “of Phillipsburgh, Westchester county, son of Thomas,” who married Sarah Weeks at Purchase in 1761. The research is in research/mcmillan/Frost_Underhill_Bowne_Feake.md, sections 1.D and 1.E.

Their families and the files

+ 4 husbands, wives and children

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

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