The following article by George Andrews Moriarty Jr. (1883–1968) of Rhode Island, New England, appeared in SDNQ vol.19, pp.73-78, December 1927:
The readers of Somerset and Dorset Notes and Queries are familiar with the activities of the Rev. John White of Dorchester in in establishing the English settlements on Massachusetts Bay early in the 17th century, but they are probably not so familiar with the Dorset families that settled in New England and it may be of interest to say something of what the Dorset and Somerset people did on the other side of the Atlantic.
The first settlement within the borders of Massachusetts proper, as distinguished from Plymouth, which until 1692 was a separate colony, was at what is called Stage Point in the old town of Gloucester, Mass. This was the settlement sent out by Rev. John White in 1624. It was composed almost exclusively of Dorset men and the head of the colony, Thomas Gardner, was in all probability a near kinsman of White. Two years later this settlement removed to “Naumkeag” and founded Salem. The descendants of Gardner became wealthy Salem merchants in the 17th and 18th centuries and flourish today in Boston, the capital of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Another New England family of great prominence was the Derby family of Salem, founded by Roger Derby, who came to New England from Topsham in 1671. His father Richard Derby of Stirthill, near Bridport, came to Plymouth, New England in 1637, stayed a few years and then returned home and lived in various places in Dorset, Somerset and Devon. He was a well-to-do merchant. His grandfather, Christopher Derby, and his great grandfather, Nicholas Derby were men of wealth and position at Stirthill and married into good Dorset families. Christopher married a daughter of William Symonds of Lyme Regis and Exeter, who was a brother of Richard Symonds of Chardstock, the grandfather of Sir Symonds D’Ewes and her mother was a sister of Maximilian Mohun of Fleet. Nicholas Derby appears to have married into the Buckler family. The mother of Roger Derby was a daughter of Roger Lechland of Chard and a niece of William Lechland, the mayor of Taunton, whose pedigree is to be found in the Somersetshire Visitation of 1623. The Derbys were settled in Dorset as early as the time of Richard II.
In New England they became very prominent at Salem as West India merchants in the 18th century. At the time of the Revolution the head of the family Elias Haskett Derby, espoused the popular side and his fast sailing vessels carried to London to the whig leaders in Parliament the Revolutionists’ account of the engagements at Lexington and Bunker’s Hill before the Government received its official dispatches.
At the close of the 18th century Elias Haskett Derby was the pioneer of the New England trade with China and India and greatly increased the family fortunes. In politics he belonged to the Federalist party that favoured England in her struggle with Napoleon and was noted for his anti-French activities. The family later moved to Boston, Mass., and became prominent in the professions. One of its members married the daughter of the late President Roosevelt.
The Hasketts were another family of prominence at Salem. In the time of Henry VIII they appear to have lived in and about Gillingham, but by Elizabeth’s reign they were established as clothiers at Henstridge over the border in Somerset. Stephen Haskett of this family, son of Ellis Haskett, a Henstridge clothier, was apprenticed in Exeter and went to Salem, Mass., in 1667. He was a sea captain and, as a trooper in the Indian War of 1675, he was present at the storming of the Nanagausett Fort. He had one son, Ellis Haskett, who went in his youth to Barbados and commanded various ships for London merchants trading with that Island. In 1701 he was appointed governor of Bahamas, where he tried to establish order among the ex-pirates and sponge fishers of the Islands. His career at New Providence was brief and stormy. In 1702 the people rose, deposed him and sent him to New York, whence he made his way to England and laid his troubles before the Board of Trade for the Plantations. About this time he engaged in litigation over the estate of a rich old uncle, Ellis Haskett of Henstridge, yeoman. His subsequent career is unknown.
Stephen Haskett’s other children were all daughters and two of them became the ancestresses of the Bowditch family of Salem, also from Dorset, and of the Derby family mentioned above. The Hasketts still flourish in England and Mr Haskett, of the Society of Genealogists in London, belongs to this family.
The Bowditches of Salem were another Dorset-Devon family. Their ancestor William Bowditch of Thornecombe and Lyme Regis went to Salem in 1672, became a prominent merchant and at his death, in 1682, was the King’s Collector for the Port of Salem. He descended from the Bowditches of Thornecombe, evidently a cadet branch of the Chardstock family and his pedigree has been traced to a certain Robert Bowditch, born after 1450. In the time of Edward VI this branch of the family were occupying, on lease, Holditch Court in Thornecombe and they married into the Beare and Acland families.
Captain William Bowditch of Salem, son of the King’s Collector, was a prominent sea captain and merchant of that town. He was born at Lyme Regis in 1664. In 1690 he commanded a ship in the ill-fated expedition, undertaken by Sir William Phips, Governor of Massachusetts, against the French at Quebec. His great grandson was the famous navigator, Nathaniel Bowditch, whose works on navigation enjoy, even today, an international reputation and have been brought out in a new edition with the last few years. In the last century the family removed to Boston, Mass., on the departure of Salem’s trade with Far East, and became distinguished in that city as conveyancers and in the medical profession.
The old town of Taunton, Massachusetts, was settled in 1639 by William Pole and his sister Mistress Elizabeth Pole or Poole, who was described by Governor Winthrop on her arrival in New England as a “wise and anciently religious maid.” Mistress Pole lived the rest of her life in the New England Taunton, and is buried in the old cemetery there. Her brother removed to Dorchester, Massachusetts, near Boston, and now a part of that city, which was settled as early as 1631 by Dorset men under the leadership of another Dorset man, Reverend John Mavericke, MA, who belonged to a family settled at Bridport. William Pole was long a prominent man at Dorchester, where he was “clerk of the writs” and he is buried in the old cemetery there with the Pole arms upon his gravestone. His descendants later settled in Boston.
William and Elizabeth Pole were the children of Sir William Pole of Colyton, the famous Devon antiquary, and in the latter’s funeral certificate, at the College of Arms, it is stated that his son William and daughter Elizabeth are “now in New England.” It is interesting to note that while the Poles in Devon were noted royalists in the Civil War, these two members of Sir William’s family became Puritans and went far away to the Puritan settlements of New England.
Another very distinguishable New England family, this time in the Colony of Rhode Island, were the Greenes from Gillingham. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Richard Greene, gentleman, of Gillingham was a person of some substance in the community; his grandson, John Greene, was a surgeon living in the Close of the Canons at Salisbury. He went to New England in 1633 and like many another Dorset man he settled at Salem. Here he espoused the cause of the famous parson there, Rev. Roger Williams, and was banished from Massachusetts; he became with Williams one of the founders of Providence, Rhode Island, and shortly after he founded Warwick, Rhode Island, in company with a Lancashire disturber, Samuel Gorton, who named the town in honour of his patron and protector the Earl of Warwick.
Greene acquired a very large landed estate in this region long occupied by the elder line of his descendants. His eldest son, John Green, Jr., was Deputy Governor of Rhode Island under King William and a stout defender of his colony in her disputes with Massachusetts. Job Greene, the son of the Deputy Governor, was Speaker of the Rhode Island House of Deputies and his grandson, William Greene, was Governor of Rhode Island at the time of the Revolution, in which dispute he took the popular side. Another grandson was Judge Philip Greene of the Rhode Island Supreme Court, whose son, Col. Christopher Greene, was a colonel under Washington and was killed at Red Bank on the Delaware in the Revolution.
Thomas Greene, a younger son of John Greene the surgeon, was the ancestor of the famous Major General Nathaniel Greene, Washington’s ablest general, whose campaign with raw militia against the trained troops of Lord Cornwallis in Carolina has been considered a masterpiece of strategy. A cousin of the Major General’s father removed to Boston, Mass., and founded a family of wealthy merchants. Unlike their Rhode Island kinsmen, they were loyalists and adhered to the Crown in the Revolutionary War. One of this family was Gardiner Greene, a wealthy Boston merchant at the beginning of the last century. He married a daughter of the famous Boston artist Copley, and a sister of John Singleton Copley, Lord Lyndhurst, the New England-born Lord Chancellor.
Among the early inhabitants of Hingham, New England, was David Phippen, brother of the Rev. George Fitzpen alias Phippen, Rector of St Mary’s Church, Truro, a zealous Puritan divine, who was imprisoned by Archbishop Laud. In his will, proved in 1651, he mentions his brother David in New England. The Visitation of Cornwall for 1620 contains a pedigree of Fitzpen, entered by Rev. George Phippen and shows that he was the son of Robert Fitzpen of Weymouth, Dorset, and grandson of Henry Fitzpen of Ottery St Mary.
Owen Fitzpen, another brother of Rev. George, was noted for a gallant exploit in the Levant; he was taken by the Turks and sold into slavery. At the head of ten Christian captives he overcame sixty-five Turks and carried their ship into Carthagena, where it was sold for £60000.
David Phippen left a numerous family many of whom became shipwrights and later merchants at Salem, where the name still flourishes. Their arms are Argent two bars, in chief three escallops sable.
The Tilly family of Newport, Rhode Island, where they long continued as respectable and well to do merchants, was founded by a Dorset man, who arrived at Boston about 1690. One has only to glance at the names over the shops at Dorchester to see that the name still lingers in its old Dorset home.
I might go on naming various new England families that have occupied respectable positions in their respective communities, for after East Anglia, Dorset, Somerset and Devon sent out the largest contingent of settlers to New England, but this note is already too long and I must close with the notice of one more Dorset man, Master John Humphrey. He was a Dorchester man and his pedigree appears in the Visitation of 1623. He was an active mover in the project for the first settlement and was appointed a member of the first court of Assistants for Massachusetts Bay, before the Company left England. He came with John Winthrop in the great fleet that sailed in the summer of 1629 and the next year he was among the founders of Boston. He acquired a large estate at Lynn, Mass., near Salem, where the name “Humphrey’s Pond” keeps him in remembrance. He did not stay long in the New World, but returned to England in or about 1641. His son or grandson, Pelham Humphrey, was organist to Charles II and is frequently mentioned by Pepys. Humphrey’s first wife, who died in England, was the daughter of Waldegrave Pelham, whose kinsman, Herbert Pelham, came to New England and founded a family long distinguished in the colonies of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and his second wife was Lady Elizabeth Clinton, a daughter of the puritan Earl of Lincoln. When Mr Humphrey returned with Lady Elizabeth to England they left three young children in Massachusetts, whose subsequent fate is unknown. One of Mr Humphrey’s daughters, by his first wife, married a puritan clergyman named Myles and went to New England, where she became the ancestress of the well known oil magnate, Rockefeller.
See also:
Essential packing for those emigrating to New England, by Glanville J. Davies