GILBERTS OF NEW ENGLAND PART I Descenda,nts of JOHN GILBERT OF DORCHESTER Compiled by GEORGE GORDON GILBERT AND GEOFFREY GILBERT PART II Descenda,nts of MATTHEW GILBERT OF NEW HAVEN, HUMPHREY GILBERT OF IPSWICH, AND WILLIAM GILBERT OF BOSTON From The Gilbert Family Manuscript Genealogy, By HOMER W. BRAINARD AND CLARENCE A. TORREY ( By permission of the Connecticut Historical Society) Edited by Geoffrey Gilbert VICTORIA, B.C. 1959 Dedicated to the Memory of JANE (ROSSITER) GILBERT, who, by Declining to Return to England with her Husband in 1653, Established the Massachusetts Line of JOHN GILBERT CONTENTS FOREWORD ix PART I. DESCENDANTS OF JOHN GILBERT OF DORCHESTER CHAPTER I. GILBERTS OF THE WEST COUNTRY 3 Appendix A. Gilberts in Records of Bridgwater St. Mary 6 Appendix B. Fourth Report on Gilbert Family, by H. Tapley-Soper, 1929 8 CHAPTER II. GILES GILBERT OF BRIDGWATER: c. 1535-1595 11 Appendix C. Will of John Gilbarte of Bridgwater, 1560 15 Appendix D. Chancery Suits Involving Property of Giles Gilbert 15 Appendix E. Will of Giles Gilbert i'6 Appendix F. Estate of Widow Joan Gilbert 18 CHAPTER III. THE SONS OF GILES GILBERT: GILES, JR., AND JOHN IN ENGLAND, 1595-1635 19 Appendix G. Documents Relating to the Street Family 27 Appendix H. Chancery Suit: Valentine Babb vs. John Gilbert 28 Appendix I. Chancery Suit: Robert Babb vs. John Gilbert 29 Appendix J. Documents Relating to Giles Gilbert, Jr. 30 CHAPTER IV. DORCHESTER INTERLUDE 32 Appendix K. Benjamin Starr 48 CHAPTER V. THE IMMIGRANTS IN TAUNTON: THE FmsT AND SECOND GENERATIONS 51 Appendix L. Court Orders Relating to John2 Gilbert 65 Appendix M. Will and Inventory of John1 Gilbert 66 Appendix M2. John Gilbert's Pondsbrooke Farm 69 Appendix N. Estate of Thomas2 Gilbert 71 Appendix 0. Will and Inventory of Giles 2 Gilbert 73 CHAPTER VI. THE NATIVE-BORN IN TAUNTON: THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATIONS 75 Appendix P. Various Deeds Relating to Ensign Thomas3 Gilbert 93 Appendix Q. Will and Inventory of Ensign Thomas3 Gilbert 95 Appendix R. Various Deeds Relating to Capt. Nathaniel~ Gilbert 96 Appendix S. Will of Captain Nathaniel• Gilbert 98 vii Appendix T. Mayflower Ancestry of Hannah (Bradford) Gilbert 102 Appendix U. Parentage and Relatives of Mary (Walker) Gilbert 103 CHAPTER VII. DIASPORA: THE FIFTH GENERATION 104 Appendix V. Confiscated Property of Col. Thomas5 Gilbert 132 Appendix W. Abstract of Will of Col. Thomas5 Gilbert 134 Appendix X. Personal Estate of J ames 5 Gilbert of Mansfield 135 Appendix Y. Revolutionary War Records of John Gilbert Descendants in Massachusetts 141 CHAPTER VIII. THE SIXTH GENERATION 145 CHAPTER IX. THE SEVENTH GENERATION 175 CHAPTER X. THE EIGHTH GENERATION 215 CHAPTER XI. THE Nn,TH GENERATION 259 CHAPTER XII. THE TENTH GENERATION 287 CHAPTER XIII. THE ELEVENTH GENERATION 309 ADDENDA 315 INDEX OF NAMES, PART I. 317 PART II. DESCENDANTS OF MATTHEW GILBERT OF NEW HA VEN, HUMPHREY GILBERT OF IPSWICH, AND WILLIA~1 GILBERT OF BOSTON INTRODUCTION 376 CHAPTER I. MATTHEW GILBERT OF NEW HAVEN 377 CHAPTER II. HUMPHREY GILBERT OF IPSWICH 411 CHAPTER III. WILLIAM GILBERT OF BOSTON 432 INDEX OF NAMES, PART II 461 ILLUSTRATIONS Pondsbrooke Frontispiece Fig. 1. Area around Bridgwater, Somerset 10 Fig. 2. Part of John Gilbert's Will Facing p. 45 Fig. 3. The Taunton Towns 50 Fig. 4. Six Mayflower Ancestors of Hannah Bradford 101 Fig. 5. Lower St. John River area, New Brunswick llO viii FOREWORD The New England Gilberts of Colonial times were descended in the main from five immigrant ancestors: John, who was in Dorchester by 1635; Matthew, who reached Boston in 1637 and helped found New Haven in 1638; Thomas, in Braintree by 1639 and in Windsor, Conn., in 1644; Humphrey, in Ipswich by 1642; and William, in Boston by 1668. Other individuals or families, more or less unidentified, appear in the records from time to time, but essentially these five men, unrelated so far as our knowledge goes, were the progenitors of the early New England Gilberts. Of the five, the Thomas group has been much the most prolific. Thomas was an elderly man when he arrived in New England, and he had six sons, five of whom proceeded promptly to found sizeable families. His tribe thus gained a full generation on the others right at the start, and they seem to have been increasing their lead ever since. ( John was also an elderly man on arrival, and he brought four sons, but only one founded a New England family. The other three immigrants were much younger). For the fifth generation, the numbered heads of families are: Thomas 83, Matthew 34, William 19, John 12, Humphrey 8. Thus the Thomas group at that stage outnumbered all the others combined, and actually its predominance was more complete than the figures suggest, since the much larger Thomas sixth generation was roughly contemporaneous with the fifth of the other families. From the point of view of the "minor" families the situation has probably worsened since then. The first and larger section of this book deals with the descendants of John, of whom I am one. Like most compilations of this nature, it has been the result of the work of many hands. The first extensive researches into the John Gilbert family seem to have been made in the 1890s by and for John Humphrey Grenville Gilbert of Ware, Mass. These not only covered the early American generations fairly completely but included a good deal of work on the Somerset background. The results were not published. Some years later, a much larger project got under way. In 1912 a member of the Thomas family, Frank Newton Gilbert of Portland, Ore., conceived the idea of collecting and publishing all possible data on the first six generations of all the New England Gilberts. An English genealo­ gist, J. Henry Hutchinson, was commissioned to inYestigate the English end, and in America Homer W. Brainard, Clarence A. Torrey, and others who had done Gilbert research were encouraged to combine and add to their results. Frank Newton Gilbert died in 1916, but the American compilations were continued and a manuscript completed about 1932. The ix X GILBERTS OF NEW ENGLAND financial conditions of the period discouraged publication, and the manu­ script was deposited with the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. In the 1920s George Gordon Gilbert of Saint John, N.B., then a resident of Boston, began a new compilation of the John descendants. Originally interested in his own branch, that of the Loyalist Colonel Thomas Gilbert, he widened his field to include the whole John tribe. He was close to the Taunton area in which the first five generations were concentrated, he had full access to the J. H. G. Gilbert data, and he was able to consult with Clarence A. Torrey, the author of the John, Humphrey, and William chapters of the Hartford Manuscript. He carried on a sustained and still­ continuing effort to trace as many of the lines as possible right down to the present day. Much the greater part of the John Gilbert material in this book has come from his files. My own connection with the project has been much shorter. It was in the 1920s that I first ascertained that I was a member of the John Gilbert family. My father, Philip Holton Gilbert of Toronto, was much interested in the discovery, and he engaged an English genealogist, the late Mr. H. Tapley-Soper of Exeter, to look into the Somerset background. Some important new facts were unearthed and are incorporated in this book. My own main interests, however, strictly amateur at all times, were pretty well confined for the next twenty years or so to the tracing of my various maternal lines-an operation conducted almost entirely through a Boston cousin, Miss Eva L. Moffatt, who was a professional genealogist. About 1952, after her death and my own retirement, I went seriously to work to edit her reports, and produced a series of multigraphed volumes, each dealing with the ancestry of one of my great-great-grandparents, which I distributed to numerous relatives and a few libraries. The conclusion of this phase in 1953 left me with some newly-acquired skills, a continuing interest in genealogy, and nothing to do. By this time, however, I had discovered George Gilbert and his material, and they offered a golden opportunity to enlarge my field of operations. I proposed that we collaborate on a John Gilbert volume, his part to be mainly to provide the facts and mine to edit them into standard form and, if results seemed to warrant, to finance publication. The John Gilbert section of this book is the result. Once the data were organized the remaining gaps became more obvious, and we have since succeeded, jointly and severally, in filling many of them. Early in 1954 there occurred an event of great importance to us and to all Gilbert students, the publication of the Thomas Gilbert material which makes up the greater part of the Brainard Manuscript mentioned above. The volume ( called, rather sweepingly, The Gilbert Family) was FOREWORD xi sponsored by A. C. Gilbert, Jr., 0 grandson of Frank Newton Gilbert, and edited by Donald Lines Jacobus. It consisted chiefly of the Brainard material, which had carried all the discoverable Thomas lines down to the seventh generation, but it added data on the later generations of a few branches. In general, it took the family into the early nineteenth century, and afforded a good many clues to the movements of individual members in the "Yankee exodus" of that period. Since our own searches for missing men of the John family were leading us into New York State and westward, the book was a great help in accounting for many Gilberts who would otherwise have had to be investigated.