It’s important to understand how very much your ancestors were in the thick of things in creating the New England colonies--and therefore, America--even though you don’t have any direct ancestors whose names are widely known except among historians. (At least until someone uncovers the lineage of your 4G grandmother Mary Sanford- #52). The story of colonial America is not the story of a few celebrities, but of thousands of dedicated, hard-working people.
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| A stained glass window in a Connecticut Congregationalist church commemorates Rev. Thomas Hooker's May 31, 1638 sermon declaring “The foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of the people.” |
More than a dozen of your direct ancestors were part of what was known in colonial times as “Rev. Hooker’s company,” a Puritan congregation from Chelmsford in England.
This group's story is representative of the whole Puritan endeavor in America.
They founded Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hartford,
Connecticut; and Hadley, Massachusetts and in doing so created what is often acknowledged as the first written
constitution for a representative government anywhere in the world and a key formative document in the development of United States government.
Your 9G grandfather John White (#1627) was a leader among this group. I drew a lot of the following from a family history of the White family, so it focuses heavily on John’s biography. But don’t take this to indicate that your other ancestors of Cambridge, Hartford, and Hadley were not interesting, too. I’m not an actual historian, so I did not research everyone involved.
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Like many Puritan leaders, Reverend Thomas Hooker (1586-1647) was educated at Cambridge University. Hooker’s second appointment as an ordained minister, in 1626, was at St. Mary’s Church in Chelmsford. Hooker had a reputation as one of the most moving and eloquent speakers of his day and his ideas concerning suffrage and government were radically democratic, even by Puritan standards. He soon gathered a loyal, committed following. In doing so, he caught the attention of Archbishop William Laud, an aggressive enforcer of Anglican orthodoxy and nemesis of reformers like the Puritans. (Laud was so offensive he was eventually beheaded.)
In 1629 Laud issued an order that amounted to a warrant for Hooker’s arrest—an action that had preceded the execution of other Puritan ministers. Hooker quickly fled to the Netherlands, and his congregation decided that enough was enough. They started to make plans to follow other Puritans to America, where the Plymouth Colony was now nine years old and the Massachusetts Bay Colony just coming to life.
Arrangements
for the exodus took a few years. Many of Rev. Hooker’s followers preceded him
to America, traveling at different times on different boats. Your 9G grandparents John and Mary Ann White arrived on the ship Lyon, which left England in June 1632 and arrived in
Boston on Sunday, the 16th of September.
Rev. Hooker arrived in 1633, at which time the group obtained permission from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to create a new settlement (imaginatively named ‘Newtown’) just outside Boston. It’s now called Cambridge.
As was the practice at that time, parcels of land in Newtown were divided up to give first choice and larger parcels to the settlers with the largest families and those who invested most in the undertaking. The Whites’ nineteenth-century family history says that “The location and quantity of John’s allotments indicate that in his contribution to the common stock of the settlement, he was in a middle place, neither among the wealthier nor the poorer. It is a fair inference from this fact that his condition in England was an easy one and that no necessity of outward circumstances drove him from his comfortable English home to the privations and perils of a wilderness.”
John was chosen to be on the board of selectmen, a committee of seven men who governed the town, and he received about two acres near the center of town for his home and livestock and 30 acres of land for farming. Harvard University’s Widener Library now occupies the land where your 9G grandparents first cleared the forest to build a home.
Hooker’s ministry continued to attract new members from the hundreds arriving each summer from England. By 1636, the congregation had outgrown its home in Cambridge. Again, they asked the colonial government for a new land grant. In June, they moved en masse to the Connecticut River valley to create a new town, which they named Hartford.
(Background: In the early colonial days, leaders of the colony would negotiate with the Natives to obtain title to the land. Then the General Court would turn the land title over to organized groups of settlers, on the condition that they move there and develop homes, farms, and a church. Settlers were not permitted to buy land directly from the natives or to just take it. This process was relatively peaceful in the 1620s and 1630s before it became clear that ‘title’ did not mean the same thing to the Natives and the Europeans. But don’t think that meant the land wasn’t disputed: The different European nations were no more respectful of each other’s land than the different tribes were respectful of the other tribes’. Our ancestors knew they were part of a competition between the English and the Dutch to see who would control the area.)
On the relocation from Cambridge to Hartford, an early historian of New England wrote:
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| 'Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636' Painting by Frederic Edwin Church, 1846 |
with great difficulty. They had no cover but the heavens, nor any lodgings but those which simple nature afforded them. They drove with them a hundred and sixty head of cattle, and by the way subsisted on the milk of their cows. Mrs. Hooker was borne through the wilderness on a litter. The people generally carried their packs, arms, and some utensils. They were nearly a fortnight on their journey. This adventure was the more remarkable as many of this company were persons of figure who had lived in England in honor, affluence, and delicacy and were entire strangers to fatigue and danger.
- Matthew Allyn (#3173)
- Robert Bartlett (#3175)
- Thomas Bliss (younger; #6685)
- Thomas Bliss (elder: #13371)
- William Clarke (#1581)
- John Crow (#1629)
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William Holton (#1593)
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Thomas Hosmer (#1653)
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Richard Lyman (#1567)
- John Warner (#1631)
- John Webster (#3305) (later governor of Connecticut)
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John Wilcock (Wilcox) (check this - is this #1783, Peter Wilcox's father?)
- Thomas Woodford (#1573)
- Elder William Goodwin (#3261)
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Elder John White (#1627)
The monument also names the following men who are related to you as brothers, uncles, or cousins of your direct ancestors:
- Thomas Beale
- Richard Church
- James Cole
- William Edwards
- George Grave
- John Marsh
- Deacon Edward Stebbins
- Major William Whiting
When the
government of Hartford was organized, White was again selected as a town
officer, and his name appears frequently in early court records as a juror or
arbiter. Richard Lyman's will is the first filed in Hartford records.
Within two years, their democratic beliefs led the Connecticut River valley settlers to break from Massachusetts Colony. Voting in Massachusetts was limited to individuals who had been formally admitted to their church after a detailed interrogation of their religious views and experiences. In contrast, Hooker and his followers were adamant that voting rights should be independent of church membership.
Representatives from Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor (see your 10G grandfather William Phelps #3271 for the Windsor part of the story) met at the end of May 1638 to form their own government. As they got to work, Rev. Hooker preached an influential sermon declaring that "the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”
In January 1639, the three settlements ratified the "Fundamental Orders of Connecticut," the first written constitution that created a representative government, which according to New England historian John Fiske gives Connecticut grounds to claim that “the government of the United States today is in lineal descent more nearly related to that of Connecticut than to that of any of the other thirteen colonies."
Soon after the death of Rev. Hooker in 1647, dissension arose within the Hartford church, having to do with requirements for participation in church privileges. (I think it had to do with whether babies could be baptized if both their parents were not in good standing.) As with such congregational disputes, they worked for several years to try to resolve it, but failed. On April 18, 1659, the dissidents left Hartford to start a new settlement farther north. Elder William Goodwin (#3261) was recognized as the leader of the group, which founded Hadley, Massachusetts. John White was again among the settlement group, along with Nathaniel Dickinson (#1623), another of our ancestors. I need to review that list of the names of the settlement group more carefully; I think I see a few more of our direct ancestors.
Goodwin, White, and
Dickinson received relatively large allotments of land in the new town. Hadley was on the frontier of that day, and was hit hard in the hostilities leading up to, and during, the French and Indian Wars.
The people of Hadley held a very stubborn attitude toward the English government. Following the failure of the republican government in England after Cromwell’s death and the restoration of the monarch in 1670, Charles II issued orders of execution for the men who had signed his father’s death warrant. Two of them, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, fled to a place where they knew they would be protected and hidden from the King’s bounty hunters: Hadley, where they each eventually died a natural death.
The rebellious
spirit did not fade over the next century. Nathaniel Dickinson's namesake great-grandson was a member of Hadley’s Committee of Correspondence
(a provisional emergency government the colonists established in each town in response to British
policy on the eve of the American Revolution). Hadley's Committee of Correspondence is on record as
the first to suggest to Boston's Committee an act of protest that would
involve dumping tea into the harbor.
* Remember that, in total, you have 1,024 9G grandfathers and 2,045 10G grandfathers and that before the mid-20th century or so, most Americans lived their lives (and married people) within the same area they were born--so a cluster of ancestors like this who knew each other and worked together isn't weird.
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