Family:John Fosdick and Ann Shapleigh (1)

"Like his father before him, John collided with the Puritan church and the theocratic government of which it was a part. But where Stephen's difficulty had related to a matter of church policy, John's difficulty had to do with a girl. Her name was Ann Shapley (or Shapleigh), and she was the daughter of Nicholas Shapley, an old friend and neighbor of Stephen's on Sconce Point and one of Charlestown's leading citizens.

In this particular case the dereliction might have gone without public notice, except for the fact that our Puritan forefathers seemed to find grim satisfaction in ferreting out and proclaiming the sins of their contemporaries. 'The church wardens shall dailie observe the carriage and lives of the people and shall forthwith informe the ministers of all such scandalous crymes as shall be committed by any of them. (James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England, p. 79.) When the 'cryme' of John and Ann was brought to light, the Puritan authorities showed no reticence and no mercy.

And it must be admitted that the dereliction was a bit unusual. Sometime in the year 1649, Ann Shapley, aged 22, married a man named Henry Branson (or Brainson). A child born to her some months after her marriage was, she confessed, the child of John Fosdick, who at that time was 23. The circumstances surrounding this bizarre situation are lost in oblivion. All that we have today are the brutal court records: the summons to the Constable of Charles town to apprehend John 'for geting Ann Branson with child when shee was single'; the testimony of the midwife relating to Ann's confession ('She [the midwife] pressing her, being very weeke, she said Jn^o ffosdic was ye father'); the summons to the Constable of Charlestown, three months later, 'to warne Ann the wife of Henry Branson to appeare at the nexte Cort at Cambridge to answere for cryme comitted by her w^th John ffosdick before she was married'; and finally the record in the Middlesex County Court reading as follows:

John ffosdicke and An Branson—are bound ov^e to ans. For there misdemean^r unto the next Quarter Cort at Boston, except the Generall Court take Cogniscance of the case before, John ffosdicke bound himself in 20^lb. bond for his psonall appearance, & his father Steeven ffosdicke bound himself in 20^lb bond for his pformance of it. (County Court Records (Middlesex County, East Cambridge). The first three citations are to be found in Folder 3, p. 2. The last citation is Vol. I, p. 12.)

And here the record stops. What punishment, if any—aside from merciless publicity—was meted out on the luckless pair there is no way of knowing. Apparently Ann continued to live with her husband, Henry Branson, and a year later, in 1651, she bore him a child, Mary Branson. At least this seems to be the only reasonable interpretation of the confused birth records of the time.† And then Henry Branson disappears from the scene. Whether he died or what became of him there is no way of knowing. But at this juncture John stepped into the picture again, and this time he married his Ann, who became the mother of nine of his children, in addition to the first child, James, that had been the cause of so much sorrow.†† One of these nine children was Samuel, from whom most of the American family is descended.

Apparently this connubial irregularity did not affect the relations between the Fosdicks and the Shapleys, for it was only a few months after the scandal developed that Stephen retained Shapley to sue for the wages of his deceased son Samuel; and when Shapley died in 1663, he mentioned John in his will and left him £20. However, the irregularity was probably not without some consequences. As we have already seen, John was not admitted to the church until he was 70 years old, and there is no record that his wife, Ann, was ever admitted. Moreover, John and Ann seem to have left Charlestown and settled for a number of years in nearby Malden, across the Mystic River. This does not necessarily imply that public opinion in Charlestown was unsympathetic; as a matter of fact, John had extensive holdings in Malden, and it is possible that he had begun to develop them prior to 1650. But it apparently was many years before he returned to Charlestown to make it his regular residence. Why this was so we do not know, but it is possible to surmise that John and Ann preferred to live in a new community where an event which had apparently rocked the colony could more easily be forgotten.

†Lewis Fosdick followed Savage and Wyman in ascribing this second child, Mary, to John Fosdick. But the Massachusetts County Records (p. 140, Charlestown births) make no reference to Mary Fosdick, but do mention a Mary Branson, 'daughter of Branson and Anna his wife, although the dates are obviously confused. The Charlestown Church Records (p. 238) under date of April 15, 1677, record the baptism of John's and Ann's children, but make no mention of Mary Fosdick. They do, however, record the baptism on the same day of Mary Branson, 'ye daughter-in-law of Jno Fosdick.' The term 'daughter-in-law' was frequently used for stepdaughter in the 17th century. This Mary Branson subsequently married Thomas Ashley. Incidentally she was admitted to the church, 'but not to Lord's Supper.' (Wyman, op. cit., p. 117.)

††The date of the marriage is not of record. Anna, their first child after their marriage, was born September 26, 1653; so their marriage apparently occurred in 1652, or perhaps in the latter part of 1651."^[1]

1. ↑ ^1.0 1.1 John Fosdick, in Fosdick, Raymond. Annals of the Fosdick family. (New York, New York: American Historical Co., c1953)
   32-34.
2. ↑ Sergt. John 4 Fosdick, in Wyman, Thomas Bellows. The Genealogies and Estates of Charlestown, Massachusetts: in the County of Middlesex and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1629-1818. (Boston, Mass.: David Clapp and Son, 1879)
   355.