Thomas Riggs

Town clerk of Gloucester for fifty-one years, 1665-1716 (Babson p. 131). He was at Gloucester by 1658, when he married Mary Millett and first appears as a grantee there. His first Gloucester record is testimony in Nov 1658 (EQC 2:134). At the Salem court on 25 June 1667 he deposed as “Thomas Riggs, aged about thirty-two years” (Essex Quarterly Court Records 3:431).

Babson says he was “said to have been educated in England for the profession of a scrivener.” TAG (2007) finds “Thomas Rigg filius Rob[er]ti Rigg de Hauckshead in Com’ Lancastrie Agricol’” apprenticed through the Drapers’ Company on 3 Feb 1646/7 for nine years to Richard Barlowe, scrivener, of Tower Street, London; Anderson inspected the originals in 2006. Y-DNA from his male-line descendants matches descendants of Edward Riggs of Roxbury, so the two immigrants “have a close common ancestor” (TAG 82:125). Representative in 1700 (not 1760, as Mollie Pfeiffer has it) and selectman “upwards of twenty years” (not 29 times). Chosen schoolmaster in 1698, “to have one shilling and six pence a day during the town’s pleasure, and the said Riggs’s likeing to carry it on.”

In 1688 he was among the Gloucester men “fined at the Superior Court in Salem for the non-compliance of the town with a warrant for the assessment of one of those odious taxes” under Andros; their complaint lists paying “the Shott for said justices by their order at the Taverne,” and “all but Somes were fined forty shillings each; to which three pounds one shilling each were added for fees” (Babson pp. 210-211). The “Thomas Millet” fined with him was his brother-in-law, not his father-in-law, who had died in 1675/6. In 1693 he was exempted from the poll tax: “Thomas Riggs, Sen. is decrepit in his lims.”

Children (Gloucester VR): Mary 1658/9, Thomas 1660 (d. 1660), Sarah 1661, Anna 1664, Thomas 1666, John 1669/70, Elizabeth 1672, Abigail 1678, Andrew 1681. Mollie’s “family of position” rests only on Babson’s scrivener tradition.

His notebook. A pigskin notebook inscribed “Thomas Riggs, his Booke, 1656” holds 12 pages of shorthand that no one could read. It also carries the verse “And if this booke whereon you Looke by Casualty be loste, restor to me, for I am he That knowe best what it Coste.” (Boston Sunday Globe, 16 Mar 1913, p. 7, quoted in TAG 82:122). The TAG authors could not find the notebook. The same newspaper account says that after his marriage his father-in-law Thomas Millett “paid Mr. Riggs for his board at the rate of two days’ labor a week.”

His house. In 1860 Babson wrote: “A part of an old house in that section of the town is still shown as the original tenement erected by him” (p. 131); his “Goose Cove” was later corrected to Little River. The Gloucester Daily Times (8 June 2026) describes the Thomas Riggs Sr. House on Vine Street, Annisquam, as squared-log construction, with elements dated to 1661 (record). A later Times article reports that the city council unanimously approved a preservation restriction on it (record).

Open questions

• The original 1688 Superior Court record behind Babson (Massachusetts Archives).
• The Gloucester Daily Times articles were read only through a summary tool; check the dating of the house (elements of 1661) against the articles themselves.