William Pontus

“William Pautes, fustian-worker, from near Dover,” of John Robinson’s congregation at Leiden, where he married Wybra Hanson on 4 Dec 1610 with William Brewster a witness (Leiden notes quoted in The Churchill Family in America, p. 2). Fustian was a stout cloth of linen and cotton. At Plymouth by 1633, when he is on the list of freemen (PCR 1:4).

On 5 Mar 1637/8 the court recorded that he had been granted “long since” two lots of land containing forty acres at “Thorp, nere Windberry Hill,” and had built a house there. “For the more comodious receipt of people into the towne of New Plymouth” he gave the lots up, keeping about five acres; the court confirmed the house to him and granted him six acres more toward the New Field (PCR 1:78-79). He was assigned to help repair the town herring weir on 17 Mar 1639 and 25 Mar 1640, and granted two acres of upland on 31 Dec 1641 (Sibert, citing Anderson and PCR).

In 1638 he sat on the jury that tried Arthur Peach and two other Englishmen for robbing “one Penowanyanquis, an Indian,” of “fiue fadome of wampeux, and three coates” (PCR 1:96-97). Penowanyanquis, a Nipmuc man, had been killed; the three were found guilty and hanged, and Bradford wrote that they “all in the end freely confessed” (Library of Congress, 2018).

His will (9 Sept 1650; exhibited 4 Mar 1652/3) left “my eldest Daughter Mary” his dwelling house, lands and goods, and “my other Daughter hannah twenty shillings sterling as an adition to her portion which in my life time I have allreddy given her,” with his son-in-law James Glasse as executor; it names no wife. At probate Samuel Dunham testified that Pontus had given John and Hannah Churchill a third of his meadow at the Watering Place, on condition that John build half of a new fence around it and “bee healpfull towards the maintainance of him whiles hee lived”; Mary Glasse, now a widow, consented, and the court confirmed the meadow to Churchill. His inventory, taken 20 Feb 1652/3 by Nathaniel and Ephraim Morton, came to £12 17s, of which house and land were £8; the rest was a chest and a box, a pot and hooks, a pewter platter, an iron skillet, two chairs, “4 ould stooles,” “one old lanthorne a trewell and a lampe,” a fork and a spade, a drawing knife, and old clothes and bedding (MD 11:92-94).

He also held land at Namassakett (Middleborough). In 1662 the court divided two newly purchased tracts among a list of freemen that still included “Wiliam Pontus,” nine years dead, and “Phillip Delanoy” (PCR 4:18-19). About 1664 his widowed daughter Hannah Churchill asked that half his share be confirmed to her (PCR 4:58), and in 1694 his grandson Samuel Delano described it as “one whole share of land at Namasket alias Middleborough,” settled on his two daughters by the court on 3 May 1664 (MD 11:251).

The family descends from him three times: through his daughter Hannah (Churchill) twice, by her sons John Jr. and Eleazer, and through his daughter Mary (Glass, Delano).