Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester (1860)

Compiled town history with abstracts of town records. Used for:

• Thomas Millett (pp. 116-117): bought William Perkins’s property at Gloucester in 1655 and succeeded him in a lay religious office; he “came here with the rare title of ‘Mr.’” as successor to Perkins, teaching elder. “Its pecuniary rewards were not always voluntarily bestowed, as the Court Records testify; and, indeed, these alone furnish information that he was engaged here in the work of the ministry at all” (p. 116). “His name does not appear among the ministers of his time; but it is certain that he labored here in spiritual things.” At Brookfield 3 June 1675; “died within a year from that time”; and “his wife was deceased, Sept. 27, 1682.” His daughter Mehetabel married Isaac Elwell, a shoemaker of Gloucester (pp. 89, 116).

• Thomas Riggs Sr.: “said to have been educated in England for the profession of a scrivener”; town clerk 1665-1716; representative in 1700; selectman “upwards of twenty years”; fined over the Andros tax in 1688, with Thomas Millet and others (“At court, all but Somes were fined forty shillings each; to which three pounds one shilling each were added for fees”, pp. 210-211); exempted from the 1693 poll tax as “decrepit in his lims” (p. 215); 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” (p. 218).

• Thomas Riggs Sr. (p. 131): town clerk “fifty-one years”; of his house, “A part of an old house in that section of the town is still shown as the original tenement erected by him.” Babson’s “Goose Cove” for Riggs was later corrected to Little River.

• Thomas Riggs Jr. (p. 131): “Thomas settled near his father… He had a second wife (Elizabeth); who died May 19, 1729, aged fifty-nine… Of his eleven children, four were sons, who married and had families in town, Thomas, Moses, Aaron, and Joshua.” His first wife Ann died Sept. 28, 1723, “aged fifty-six” (the VR has the second wife’s death as May 19, 1727). His brother John lived on the west side of the Annisquam River, and married Ruth Wheeler, Jan. 1, 1689/90.

• Bridget Varney: “Bridget Varney was of Ipswich in 1663. In 1669, then a widow, she sold house and land, with the harbor and neck of land on the south-east, to Bartholomew Foster.” Babson places the property near the present Mill Street.