(John Brownson married) Frances Hills, whose baptism was not found in the Pariah Registers of Halstead, but who may have been an unrecorded daughter of either Anthony or William Hills of Halstead, or may have been related to
them in some other way. The given name of the wife of John Brownson is not mentioned in any New England record that the contributor (John Insley Coddington) has seen, and it is possible that Frances (Hills) Brownson died, and that the children born in Connecticut were by a subsequent wife. But the contributor is inclined to think that Frances was the only wife of John, and the mother of all his children. The name Frances is not biblical and was therefore not at all in favor with Puritans. Yet Abraham Brunson, the youngest son of John1 Brownson, gave to one of his daughters the un-Puritan name of Frances, and it is hard to see why he should have done this unless he were commemorating his mother. The widow of John1 Brownson survived her husband, but her death was not recorded at Farmington or elsewhere in Connecticut. Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman's splendid Hale, House and Related Families (Hartford, Conn., 1952) contains a section {pp. 579-607) on the family of William Hills of Hartford, Conn., in which (p. 579) the authors quote W. S. and Thomas Hills, Hills Family in America (1906), pp. 658-9. to the effect that William Hills, the future settler in Hartford, was perhaps baptized at Upminster, co. Essex, 27 Dec. 1608. It seems quite possible that there may have been a relationship between the different branches of the Hills family in Essex, and that William Hills and his contemporary Frances (Hills) Brownson may have been akin. But all this is conjecture and the matter needs further study.
