John Churchill

Of Hobbs Hole, Plymouth. On the 1643 list of men able to bear arms; freeman 1651. In 1645 he bought Richard Higgins’s house, garden and orchard “situate neere Browne’s Rock” for £12 in “corne or cattell”; Higgins could take “the boards that lyne the inward roome, and the bedstead,” but had to leave “thirty good fruit trees.” Earlier the court had given him “the disposing of the house and land yt was Gorge Clarks for the vse and good of Abigaell Clarke” (PCR 2:18). He married Hannah Pontus on 18 Dec 1644, and her father later gave them a third of his meadow at the Watering Place, on condition that John help fence it and “bee healpfull towards the maintainance of him whiles hee lived” (MD 11:93). On 24 Dec 1662 he made a spoken will before his kinswoman Abigail Clarke, “aged twenty three years,” saying he “knew not whether there would be anything left when his children were brought up.” His inventory, £74 14s 8d, included “2 guns,” “a sword and shot pouch,” and books worth 6s (all from The Churchill Family in America, 1904).

Ancestor twice: through his son Sgt. John Jr. (Elizabeth Churchill, wife of Joel Ellis) and his son Eleazer (Mary Churchill, wife of Edward Stephens).

Open questions

• His birth and origin are unknown. Mollie’s “Joseph Churchill of London, merchant” as his father, and a Norman “de Courcil” descent, have no evidence; she noted herself that it “is not, however authentic.”
• The colonial tree treats the marriage date, 18 Dec 1644, as documented; the page has it from The Churchill Family in America (compiled). It was not found among the Plymouth marriages printed in PCR 8 (searched in the archive.org full text).