Joseph Peck

Of Hingham, Norfolk, where his brother Rev. Robert Peck was rector from 1605 (Ira Peck p. 25). The brothers came to New England together in 1638 in the ship Diligent of Ipswich, John Martin master; the History of the Town of Hingham (1893) counts 133 passengers by that ship who settled at Hingham. Printed sources spell the ship “Diligent”; Mollie Pfeiffer has “Diligence.” Daniel Cushing’s Hingham record, via Ira Peck: “Mr. Joseph Peck and his wife with three sons and daughter and two men servants, and three maid servants, came from Old Hingham, and settled at New Hingham.”

At Hingham he was “Representative, or deputy to the General Court in 1639, 1640, 1641 and 1642,” and also a selectman, justice of the peace and assessor, appointed “to grant summons and attachments, to see people joined in marriage” (Ira Peck pp. 15-17). In 1641 he was a principal purchaser of Seacunk (Rehoboth), and he moved there in 1645. The account of the move, as Ira Peck quotes it “upon the Rehoboth records”: “riding thither they sheltered themselves and their horses in an Indian wigwam, which by some occasion took fire, and (although there were four in it, and labored to their utmost) burnt three of their horses to death, and all their goods, to the value of fifty pounds.”

His will is in his own hand (Plymouth Colony wills, printed by Ira Peck pp. 19-20). It gives “my gould Ringe” to his son Joseph and “my two silver wine cupps” to John and Nicholas, divides the rest among “my six sonnes … the youngest and weakest to have as good a share as the eldest and strongest,” and names “Mr Newman and my brother Thomas Cooper” as supervisors. A deathbed addition recorded by the sons gave Joseph “half his meddow that hee purchased of Mr Bradford lying on the further side of the new Meddow River.”

His second wife is unnamed; Pane-Joyce says she was a sister of Thomas Cooper, which fits “my brother Thomas Cooper” in the will.

Mollie calls him “a lineal descendant for twenty-one generations of John Peck of Belton,” citing the Harleian Society visitations. That is unproven. The printed visitations she cites (vol. 2, Leicestershire 1619, pp. 146-148; vol. 16, Yorkshire 1563-4, p. 236) begin with Richard Peck of Wakefield and have no Belton and no Beccles branch. Ira Peck says the pedigree in the British Museum is his source “excepting the two last families, those of Robert and Joseph, which are added to it,” and that the motto “has been added.”

Open questions

• Who was his second wife? Was she a sister of Thomas Cooper, as Pane-Joyce says?
• The British Library manuscript behind Ira Peck’s pedigree, and Harleian Society vol. 3 p. 27, not yet checked.