Person:John Briggs (10)

From the New England Historic Genealogical Society "Register", Vol. 151 (January 1997)

William and Mary Briggs of Boston and The Connecticut Valley With Notes on their Sons-in-Law John Harris and Wolston Brockway [Footnotes omitted] by Gale Ion Harris

Recorded as a "turner' at Lyme and once as a "boatman" in Boston, John Briggs signed documents by mark, moved often, and was put down as "dead and pore when living" in Boston's tax abatements for the year 1700. No record of him appears in Wethersfield or Middletown while his parents were there, so it cannot be said whether he went there from Boston with them in 1665. If he did, he had returned to Boston by January 1668/9, when he and his wife Mary recorded a daughter, Mary, and subsequently a son, William, in August 1672. John did join his father in Lyme by 16 January 1672/3, however, when the town granted him a ten-acre home lot and other lands by Mile Brook and Lieutenant's River. A Lyme town meeting in March 1673/4 "voted that John Brigs and Henry Petterson shall have that peec [sic] of meadow against John Bridgs on the other side of Lieutenant's River," but the grant went unrecorded until June 1685.

Again but not yet for the last time, John and Mary Briggs returned to Boston. On 17 November 1674, he was styled "of Boston, turner" when they sold their Lyme house lot and ten acres to Leonard Austen. They recorded sons John and Jonathan at Boston in December 1674 and March 1678/9. The next record of them is at Lyme again, on 17 April 1680 (but seemingly a mistake for 1681), when the clerk entered the birth of their son Peter ("born the 5: ffeb 1680") as an addendum to the existing record of their son William's birth about eight years before. On the apparent day Peter was born (5 February 1680/1), John Briggs of Lyme, turner, received from his father the four acres and house frame that had belonged to John's brother-in-law Wolston Brockway, and adjoined the land formerly belonging to John Chappell. Next June, John renewed his earlier "ear marke for all sorts of creatures."

John was contemplating his next move. At a town meeting in Wethersfield on 26 December 1681, "one Briggs now resident at lime who desired to come to sit downe with us here, he being a turner by trade," was granted liberty to "come & inhabit amongst us provided that he brings a fuddicient certificate of his good conversation according to law." John did not accept the invitation, perhaps being unwilling to meet the condition.

On 11 May 1682, by mark, "John Briggs of Lyme, turner" sold his property there to Brockway's son-in-law Thomas Champion, and returned a final time to Boston. There, he and his wife Mary recorded the birth of twin sons in April 1685 and had four children baptized at the Old South Church that September. He was a taxpayer in Boston's Division Six in 1687, when he was styled "boatman" to distinguish him from another John Briggs residing at least since 1681 farther north in town (Division Four). The John of Division Six was still there in 1691. In 1695 his son William Briggs joined him there as an inhabitant. His second wife and widow, Sarah, was residing there in 1705 when she married Wolston Brockway of Lyme at the Old South Church.

From Savage's Genealogical Dictionary

JOHN, Boston 1673, s[on]. of William, rem[oved]. that y[ea]r. to Lyme, there by w[ife]. Mary had William, b[orn]. 30 July 1672 or 3; and Peter, 5 Feb. 1680.

1. ↑ James Savage, Former President of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Editor of Winthrop's History of New England. 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. (1860-62 and Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, MD, 1965; Corrected electronic version copyright Robert Kraft, July 1994)
   Vol. 1, p. 251.