Working On: Robert Williams of Roxbury

Ancestry.com, Tree of Midge Frazel, 2017
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Working On: Robert Williams of Roxbury, MA

I find it a daunting task to work on my earliest New England Ancestors. I decided that I would spend some time working on Robert Williams (1607-1694) of Roxbury, MA to see if I could do a better job than 10 years ago with finding sources instead of relying on Wheeler's History of Stonington, CT for information.

Because this is NOT a Williams family which includes Roger Williams of Rhode Island (not my ancestor), I decided to see what the brief (4 generations) genealogy of Robert Williams of Roxbury, Massachusetts, had to say, because I think that this genealogy is the source of Wheeler's chapter on the Robert Williams family. I found the right genealogy easily at the Internet Archive and downloaded it as a PDF and compared it to the information in Wheeler's History. 

As the gravestone of Col. John Williams is one that I want to write about in my Granite-in-MY-Blood blog, I wondered if it was possible to find out where Robert Williams came from in England now that some parish records have been digitized. 

I found a baptismal record at Ancestry.com. I was very surprised and pleased. Facebook friends may also be descended from him so I thought it worth my time to look into this before I write about Col. John Williams and his wife Desire Denison who are one set of my 6th great grandparents. They are buried at Whitehall Cemetery in Mystic, CT. Their daughter, Thankful Williams, wife of Avery Denison, china is on display at the Denison Homestead. 

https://archive.org/details/robertwilliamsof00will

In addition to this resource, I have Martin Hollick's expanded version of his book, New Englanders in the 1600s to use as a reference. Martin's book gives me hope that I will be able to understand my earliest ancestors who came to America. His books and his emails have been a big help to me thorough the years.

I would never have thought that I could research immigrant (New England) ancestors with any luck when I started looking for gravestones. 

Finding the baptismal record with a date of 11 Dec 1608 in St. Nicholas Parish Church in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England presented a new challenge of big able to actually read it and see that it matches the transcription provided by Ancestry. It worked!

In another one of those "not so rare genealogy date events", that is the day and month in which my only child was born in 1975.