Person:Henry Rowley (2)

Henry Rowley and Thomas Blossom emigrated in the Speedwell but it seemed unseaworthy. So it turned back leaving the Mayflower to proceed alone.

First found when taxed 9s. in the Plymouth Court Records on 24 Mar 1633, indicating he arrived at Plymouth in 1632. He was taxed 18s. the following year. By the following September (1634), when Rev. John Lathrop arrived in Scituate, Goodman Rowley already had a house. Henry became one of the first members of Lathrop’s church (on 8 Jan 1634/5 - the week after he was admitted as a freeman) and was known as “deacon.” On 1 January 1637/8 Henry Rowley was one of the freemen of Scituate who complained that their proportions of land were too small to subsist upon and with the others received upland, neck, and meadow between the North & South Rivers ^[3]

Henry and his wife Anne later accompanied Latrop to Barnstable in 1640. He was twice Barnstable constable in 1641, Deputy for Barnstable to General Court, 29 August 1643, surveyor of highways in 1646, 1647 and 1653. He appears in the Barnstable section of 1643 Plymouth list of men able to bear arms.

Henry eventually moved to West Barnstable with his step-son Peter Blossom and later to Falmouth. He last appears on a list of freeman on 28 May 1670, in the Barnstable section. The inventory of estate of "henery Rowley of Sacconesset" exhibited in Court, July 1673. Included in the estate was a debt of £29 to Jonathan Hatch, his son-in-law, for land sold to Henry. ^[4]

Henry was probably the son or grandson of Henricus Rowley of Bennington (1545-1605). This family had several members named Moyses (Moses), which was the name of Henry’s oldest son.^[5]

President Ulysses L. Grant and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill descend from this family.

Text References

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 Anderson, Robert Charles. The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1995).
2.   Savage, James. A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England: Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May, 1692, on the Basis of Farmer's Register. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1860-1862), 3:582.

   "HENRY, Plymouth 1631, perhaps came in the Charles, with Hatherly, was of Scituate 1634, with his w. partook in gather. of first ch. there, 8 Jan. 1635, and rem. to Barnstable with Lathrop 1639, m. 17 Oct. 1633, Ann, wid. of Thomas Blossom, prob. as his sec. w. for I suppose Sarah, wh. m. 11 Apr. 1646, Jonathan Hatch, was his d."

3. ↑ Plymouth Colony Records 1:72
4. ↑ Great Migration
5. ↑ “The Circumstantial Evidendence Leading to a Possible Solution to the “Palmer-Paddock Puzzle”,” The Colonial Genealogist, Vol XII, No. 1-2, The Augustan Society, 1984.