THE ONE WILLIAM BUCKLIN THEORY. Charles Edward Banks, in his two
authoritative books,
The Winthrop Fleet of 1630, and Planters of the Commonwealth, records that
William Bucklin came to New England in the Massachusetts Bay Colony's ships of
1630 ("Winthrop fleet of 1630"). There is no known regular passenger list
of the passengers in the various ships of the Winthrop fleet, but Winthrop did
keep a journal in which he apparently tried to record most of the persons
traveling in that initial group of ships with him. William's name does show up on
Winthrop's journal notes, where Winthrop records William as being a :servant of John Plaistow"
That note by Winthrop is what Bank's
uses for his report of William's immigration..
Plaistow was a gentleman, from Essex. Space was limited in the Winthrop fleet
ships. Only persons with the rank of a noble or the formal rank of "gentleman" had space or temporary
cabins on the upper deck. Even having sufficient money to
pay for a cabin on deck, or being a member of an extended family in which someone was nobility, did
not qualify a person for having a cabin on the deck. However, those having
cabins on deck did have the priviledge of their servants attending them in their
cabin. Winthrop's note that William was on board as a
"servant" of Plaistow means that William had the privilege denied
others of ready and daily access to the upper deck.
The William Bucklin of Hingham of 1634 was certainly a man of inventive
intelligence in building a successful life in New England. Such a person
could easily have considered it good strategy for a man who wished to save money on an
exploratory and expensive trip to New England, and who also realized the huge
advantages of not being confined below decks with most of the passengers, to agree to be a servant for a period of time for a gentleman
immigrating to New England.
However, William's relationship to Plaistow got William before a court.
After arriving in
New England, Plaistow took four baskets of corn belonging to "Chickatabot"
(an American Indian) in September, 1631. For this theft, Plaistow was degraded
by court order from
the title of gentleman, ordered to restore eight baskets of corn to Chickatabot,
and to pay a fine of five pounds to the Colony. "His men William
Buckland and Thomas Andrew" were ordered to be whipped for being accessories
(not for doing the actual stealing, but apparently for not reporting the theft).
Furthermore, Governor Winthrop was determined that his new colony should be a
godly community; therefore, the Massachusetts Bay Colony early sent back to
England those persons who were causing social problems. As a part of the
sentence for his theft, the Colony ordered Plaistow back to England. Buckland and
Andrew were not the subject of a court order (as was Plaistow) sending them back
to England. However, under the social expectations of the time, it would
be assumed that if a man with servants was going back to England, it would be
expected that his servants would be going with him under their obligation to
attend their master. If that expectation became reality, William
would have retuned to England with Plaistow, on the next available ship, either
in the autumn of 1631, or in the spring of 1632.
Now let us turn for a moment to the "two Wiliams theory", which we disagree
with. After that we will come back to the Hingham records, which lend
further support to the "one William theory."
THE TWO WILLIAMS THEORY. Some researchers have surmised that there were two William
Bucklins: one arriving in 1630 and the other in 1634. Some authors have noted that
the William Buckland/Bucklin of the era 1645 had a son
Joseph, who was born in 1633, in England, and came with his mother to American in
1634. This has led some authors into saying that William first came to the New World in
1634 on the ship Elizabeth Dorcas.
We do agree that if William was the father of Joseph, then William was in
England in 1632/1633. Carl Boyer III, in his book Ancestral Lines,
says that the government authorities detained the ship Elizabeth Dorcas at
Gravesend, Eng., from 22 Feb 1634 until the early spring of 1634 waiting for a
determination that all passengers had secured the necessary papers (i.e., that they
were Church of England members) for immigration. From the fact of the age of
Joseph at his death, we can deduce that Joseph was born in 1633 or 1634, and from the fact
that the ship did not leave until the spring of 1634, we can deduce that his
father
William was in England in 1633.
Although the "Two Williams Theory" is possible, we favor the "One William
Theory," to wit: that the William Bucklin who arrived in 1630 was the same
William Bucklin who arrived (returned to the Colony) sometime before 1634.
Certainly it is at least equally possible that there was one William, who went back to
England to talk to his family, and then returned to New England to prepare the
way for them. Given the small number of immigrates before 1635, It
is more likely than not that only one William Bucklin, not two, decided in a
three year window to
immigrate, in the Winthrop fleet ships, to an area of a few square miles on the south shore
of the Boston bay. (Plaistow, whose "servant" William Bucklin was in
1631, had landholdings in the
area of Dorchester/Hingham, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the same area in which we find
William Bucklin settling with his family in 1634.)
We are certain of the Winthrop note, which clearly has William Bucklin on
board one of the vessels of the 1630 Winthrop fleet. Aside from the
records of the Court of the Colony,. the only records the Colony maintained with
rigor in the 1630's were the birth, marriage, and death records. We are certain
that those records contain no record of a death
of William Bucklin/Buckland/Buckler before 1634 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
We therefore can state that the William Bucklin who arrived in 1630 did not die
before 1634. Also, we are certain of the lack of any record of two William Bucklins/Bucklands/Bucklers
living in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the small area of
Hingham/Dorchester/Weymouth, at the same time.
ORAL TRADITION OF IMMIGRATION FROM "WEY", ENGLAND, TO THE BAY COLONY. The oral
tradition, established at least before 1900 was that : "William Bucklin
came from Wey [sic], England, which was a shipbuilding center at the time. It
was at the mouth of the Wey river." [1920's oral history from George Bucklin of
Minnesota, to his children Leonard, Ethel, and Marie.] "Wey" is a
place name not known generally today, so there often is a tendency of
researchers today to assume that "Wey" is a mistaken or shortened form
of "Weymouth", England. However, there is a place that in the 17th
century was named "Wey"! That is:
inland from the present town of Weymouth is Radipole. In Roman times, the tidal
basin of the river Wey furnished a harbor at "Wey". For several centuries, until
the tidal basin became too shallow for ships and the harbor moved southward, Radipole was known as Wey.
Radipole, a.k.a., Wey would be a place where ships were built.
Also, according to pre-1930 handwritten notes of George Bucklin of Minnesota,
there was a plot of Bucklin graves by the church at " Wey", with a
large central shaft among the Bucklin family graves. Indeed. there is a church
with graves in Radipole (Wey). The church at Radipole (Wey) does in fact have a
large central shaft in the graveyard. Although the shaft has Lethbridge as the
main name, the Lethbridge and Buckler families were connected and there is in
the graveyard a tomb for a family named Buckler. Because "Bucklin" and
"Buckler" are both Old English pronunciation variations of "Buckland", the oral
history is consistent with the Radipole cemetery as the "Wey" burial
place of the ancestors of William Bucklin
Radipole is about 1 mile across the fields from the town of Buckland-Ripers. Radipole has
a substantial house which was the house of Andrew Buckler in the 1500's. This
house, known as the "Causeway House" is at a bridge over the Wey, at
what would in previous centuries been the head of the tidal basin, a logical place for a
shipwright to live. The Causeway House is associated with the
"Buckler" name. Because Bucklin and Buckler are both easy early
pronunciation variations
of "Buckland", the oral tradition of William Bucklin being a
shipwright out of Wey is again consistent with the facts otherwise available.
The Causeway House is noted in the registers of St. Anne's church as having
several persons "out of the house of Andrew Buckler...dying of ye plage" in
1563.
The family of the Causeway House had substantial wealth, and although members
were not titled as nobles, one member was as a Privy Counselor at the court of
Elizabeth I, and the house was associated with a family of which the members
could well be accorded the title of "gentleman.". Again this is
consistent with the fact that when William Bucklin came to New England he early
seemed to have much more cash than the average immigrant, being able to buy
substantial amounts of land. Further, the earliest history of Pawtucket
states that William Bucklin was always referred to as "Goodman Bucklin", the way
in which persons titled as gentleman were addressed as the time.
The oral tradition of William Bucklin being a shipwright is again consistent
with the fact that although William was not a member of the Newman Church
(indeed had beliefs that kept him outside that church), and had sufficient land
and interests to keep him busy without hiring out as a carpenter, William
was hired to do major renovation/construction on the Newman Church in the period
of 1656 - 1660. There is no sensible reason for the church asking the
major landowner of the area to furnish carpenter work, except that William must
have had carpenter skills that were recognized as being exceptional for the
area.
Also, there is no logical reason for the oral tradition of the Bucklin family
to say that William came from "Wey"
except a foundation of true fact. The ships of the Winthrop fleet did not sail from
Weymouth (rather from London), but the Weymouth area was a major
contributor of immigrates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This contribution can
be traced to the powerful influence of the Weymouth church pastor, John White,
who was in the very center of the great religious and political controversies
that were to divide England during the rest of the 17th century. For
religious reasons, White
encouraged his church members in Weymouth to leave with the Winthrop fleet for New England.
Further support for the Weymouth area as being William's point of origin of
emigration, is the fact that the 1634 settlers in Hingham (of which William was
one) were generally from Dorchester (Dorset, England). (The 1634 group was not from Hingham, England, which is in Norfolk, north of London, not near Dorchester in
Dorset.) That era 1634 immigration of Dorchester, England, area persons to the south
shore of Boston harbor accounts for the place names of "Weymouth" and
"Dorchester"
on the south shore of the Massachusetts Bay near Hingham (MBC).
[Dorchester (MBC) is just
north of Hingham (MBC). Hingham,
Dorchester, and Weymouth were grouped together in one Quarter Court area when the system of Quarter Courts was established in
1635 (MBCR 1:169).]
MARY'S ARRIVAL IN HINGHAM. The Bosworth Genealogy asserts that in Hingham,
"Atlantic Ave was where the ship "Elizabeth brought the wife of
William Buckland" (Mary Bosworth), his small son Joseph Bucklin, her mother
Mary Bosworth and her brothers and father." Significantly, this
careful researcher did not find evidence that William Buckland also came on the
same ship at the same time.
Henry Sewall, a passenger on the Elizabeth Dorcas. in 1634 lent some money to the
Bosworth family to help pay the ship for the passage of Bosworth family
(including Bucklin's wife and child). Because what we know of William
Bucklin indicates he had a relatively large amount of cash in New England, this
again indicates that William was not on the ship which brought his wife.
On 7 July
1635, at Plymouth Court, the court ordered William Buckland, and three Bosworths
(Jonathan, Nathaniel, and Benjamin Bosworth) to each pay Sewall a quarter of the
amount owed to Sewall.
(William's father in law had died during the ship journey and any cash he had
would have ordinarily have passed into the hands of his sons on board) Only
William paid his share at once. The Bosworths only paid incomplete amounts, at intervals,
at various later dates.
The fact that William was ordered to pay 1/4 of the passage of 7
people (his wife, his son, his father in law, his mother in law, and three
brothers in law) but no mention of a charge for his own passage, again is consistent
with William not being on the ship, and not having contracted with the ship
master for passage of his wife and child or his in-laws before the ship left England.
THE HINGHAM RECORDS. TBy 1635 William was a "proprietor" of Hingham. The 1635 Hingham records start the documented lines of
residence, births and deaths of the
Bucklin family. One can trace the William Bucklin line with certainty after that
point in time.
Hingham is one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts. The original settlers,
in 1633, came from Hingham, Norfolk County, England, and settled in what was
then known as Bare Cove. Hingham lay close to a later town named Weymouth by the
English settlers of Weymouth. The nearby river was by 1665 known as the Weymouth
River, which was one of the boundaries to the land stated in a grant from the
Indians to the Hingham town fathers in that year. Hingham lay on the border-line
between the jurisdictions of the Plymouth Colony (Mayflower Separatists) and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony (Winthrop Puritans) ; and seems mostly to have been a
result of the influx of colonists with the Winthrop organization.
In 1635 William received a town lot of five acres, located in what is now West
Hingham. The Hingham records say:
"In 1635 Wm. Buckland was given a Town Lot and Our Lot at the foot of
Otis Hill."
The land was said to be on the north side of Weary-All Hill. A 1930's
researcher of Bucklin history asserted that the hill is now called Otis Hill,
and that the Hingham railroad depot in the 1930's was the place where
William had his lot.
After 1635, William acquired several
additional parcels of realty, in Hingham,
Rehoboth, and Attleboro. He sold his house and land in Hingham on 25 May 1661,
long after he lived in Rehoboth.
An inventory of 22 Sep 1642 of the estate of Capt. Bozan Allen (a ship
captain and merchant) of Hingham lists William as a debtor owing the estate a
sum of money. Because William seemed to have sufficient cash at all
times, and ordinarily paid promptly when the contracted time of payment arrived,
this estate debt suggests some sort of outstanding business venture
between Allen and Bucklin in Hingham.
Hingham (MBC) has an interesting and turbulent early history. The first settlers
were a band of single and not entirely savory men, who came from the London area.
These single men arrived because of their theory that
earlier settlers had not done well because the early settlers had been
encumbered with families and religion. By William's ca. 1633 era entry to Hingham, these
earlier first settlers had given way to the religious, family oriented type of persons characteristic of
the Winthrop fleet. These after 1633 settlers brought men of substance from the
Dorchester England area who wanted to run
Hingham their way, to the discomfort of the Bay Colony government.
About 1645 the town of Hingham was in uproar, with some men being jailed for
disobedience in regard to who were to be the officers of the town militia, and
the town of Hingham seeking the impeachment of Governor Winthrop. We think these 1645
events in Hingham may be significant to Bucklin family history, because, as is
noted below, the first mention of William Bucklin having a real property interest in
Pawtucket is in 1645.
BUCKLIN'S 1645 OR EARLIER MOVEMENT TO PAWTUCKET. In 1636, Roger Willliams had
settled in the Rehoboth, Rhode Island area (on the east side of the Pawtucket
River) when he first fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When told that
the Plymouth Colony claimed this land, he moved to the west bank of the river and
called his new settlement "Providence". The east bank of the river,
Seekonk (Pawtucket) continued to be an area of homes of religious dissenters who were not approved by the Plymouth Colony for settlement in that
area Near Hingham is Weymouth. Weymouth was the site of religious
dissension lead by Rev. Samuel Newman. Newman and a part of his congregation,
for religious reasons, decided to leave the settled Plymouth Colony and move to
the Rhode Island area of religious dissenters.
The Newman congregational group purchased land in 1643 in what is now Pawtucket,
Massachusetts. Rehoboth was on the east side of the Pawtucket River and about
three miles from the Falls which were the heart of Pawtucket and the Jenks
industrial community. The Rehoboth area had been purchased from the Indians in
1641 by John Hazell. By 1642 John Hazell resided there with 600 acres he
thus owned on the Pawtucket River.
The land on the East side of Narragansett Bay was claimed by the Plymouth
Colony as being part of the grant of lands for the Plymouth Colony. (More
exactly, the grant by the King was to certain gentlemen, who were supposed to
hold the land in their name and distribute it to others as they felt appropriate
to the colonny. William Bradford was one of the original grantees, and he
had reserved the land on the East side of Narragansett Bay for his own
ownership.) in 1649, Hasels was sued in the Plymouth Court in 1649, and lost.
The land in the litigation was described in the litigation in the same metes and
bounds description that Bucklin used in describing his purchase of land from
Edward Smith which had purchased it from John Hasels at some time. The legal
theory of the time would have made the Plymouth Court's judgment of title
against Hasels of no effect against Smith, so one suspects that when the
litigation was threatened, Hasels then sold the land to Smith..
Today the east side of the land of John Hazel is almost the same bounds as the east side of
Pawtucket, RI. ( The former Rehoboth, MA, is now partly in East Providence, RI,
and partly in Pawtucket, RI.
[ Note: The sequence of town names is that there first was the area known
as Seconet or Seekonk. In 1645 Seconet became Rehoboth. Rehoboth as a town
purchased land to the north of the land of William Bucklin, which land was known
as the "North Purchase". Attleboro, mentioned in some records in connection with
the Bucklin family, became a separate town when it separated from Rehoboth in
1694 as the North Purchase land. Attleboro exchanged land with Rehoboth in 1710.
Pawtucket was a separate town, originally only on the west side of the river,
subsequently on both sides. Pawtucket only because a part of Rhode Island
in 1862.]
At about the same time of the move of the Hingham church group of the Rev. Newman and his group, to Rehoboth for
religious reasons, William seems to have been involved in a move to the
Rehoboth area. William decided to move west, across the short distance from the
Bay Colony to the bay/river edge of Rehoboth.
William's wife and her parents were Quakers. William and his sons in
New England were Baptists. As a result, William never joined the church of
Rev. Newman, and probably did not move "with" the Newman congregation to the
Rehoboth area. More likely, William moved when it appeared the Newman
congregation was going to move there, and when William discovered that the 600
acres of John Hasels were available for his purchase.
William's house was in the area of the purchase of John Hasels. A large 600
acre tract of land on the east bank of the Pawtucket River had been purchased by
John Hasels from the Indians, but the Plymouth colony insisted that they had
jurisdiction over the land. Hasels divested himself of the land at the
insistence of the colony, by selling to Edward Smith, who in turn had the same
sort of troubles about the right to be on the land.
The Rehoboth Town Meeting Records of 1 Feb 1645 state:
"...At the same time the way to William Buckland's house is agreed on by
those partyes which it doth conform."
Thus, it seems clear that at least by 1645 William had a house on his own
property, and a common roadway through someone's property was agreed upon.
Elsewhere, we suggest that it was only Hasels and Bucklin that would have any
interest in recording such an agreement, as resolving a roadway over Hasels land
to land sold to Bucklin. See Rehoboth Area
land ownership details.
The date of 1656 is given by some researchers as the date when William moved
to Rehoboth, MA, from Hingham. Apparently this date mistakenly was chosen
by them, in preference to the 1645 date (or earlier) by which he had a house on the land, because
these researchers only had available to them the 1656 Old
Proprietary Records of Rehoboth which show that at a Town Meeting in 1656, William Bucklin then recorded
his land as:
"600 acres of land wch John Hasels wch I bought of Edward Smith bounded
on Pawtucket River on the west & unto a Run yt somes from the cedar swamp on
the east upon the south with lands yt was John Reads and upon the north the
common as we go to Mr. Blaxtons."
Unless William obtained this land by some sort of credit, it seems that
William was a man of some wealth, since he at that time also owned land in
Hingham, and
his 600 acres north of Rehoboth were about a square mile of land, and included the most
valuable land in the area. Bucklin's land area
was almost equal to land holdings of the entire congregation of
Rev. Newman in their Rehoboth settlement.
I see nothing inconsistent with (1) William moving to the Rehoboth area
(Pawtucket) in 1645, and settling by purchase or other agreement on the Hasels
land, when the way to his house was agreed upon and noted in the town records,
and (2) when Hasels and Smith had their title difficulties with the Plymouth
Colony in the late 1640's then buying the whole 600 acres from Hasels, with
Smith, a Providence resident, acting as a middleman. With the land being
the subject of attention of the Plymouth Colony, it would be prudent not to
record in public records an ownership that came from others than the Plymouth
Colony. Significantly, it was about the time that William recorded his
land with the town of Rehoboth that Bradford and the Plymouth Colony had
completed compromising with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rhode Island
whether and where the Plymouth Colony owned land on the Narragansett Bay. Certainly, until about
1650
this area in Rehoboth was one that gave its purchasers trouble with the
Plymouth Colony or the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially if the claim was
that the title initially
came from a purchase from the Indians instead of through the King of England and
his patentees..
William was not a member of the "Newman" church in Pawtucket, but he
did carpenter work on the church. William's son Joseph and many Bucklins were buried in the church graveyard.
In 1656 William was chosen to serve on a grand jury in Rehoboth. Again, this
suggests that William was not a newcomer in 1656 but instead already was well
established in the area. By English common law and the early tradition of
the Bay Colony the grand jury was selected from men who were well
acquainted with the persons and affairs of the area. The common law was
that these grand jurymen, using their own knowledge, were to accuse those who
deserved punishment, not a job for a newcomer to the area.
On 17 March 1657, William and Peter Hunt were engaged to enlarge the meeting
house. On 9 Dec 1659, William was appointed, with a Lieut. Hunt, to
"shingle the new end of the meeting house & to be done sufficiently
as the new end of Goodman Paynes house, and they are to find nail & to be
done by May day next ensuring provided that the frame is up in season--in
consideration whereof they are to have 8 pounds to be paid in good merchantable
wampan when their work is done"
According to the Plymouth Colony Records for 23 Feb 1657 William took on that
day the oath of Fidelity, if not before, and therefore was listed in the
colony's records as a "freeman" (which simply meant someone who had
taken the formal oath of allegiance to the colonial government). The oath may
have been in connection with the fact that the same day at the town meeting for
Rehoboth certain men agreed to go see what meadows they could find north of the
town. This land subsequently became known as the North Purchase and was
immediately to the north of the Bucklin land on the river.
William sold land in Hingham on May 25, 1661. This suggests that
William had capital that could be invested in land other than where he lived,
because it is sure from the Pawtucket records that his residence must have
been in Pawtucket for several years before he sold the land in Hingham.
Hence William must have been renting out the Hingham house for years.
The exact line between the north side of Bucklin's land and the south border
of the North Purchase was often in dispute for years after the 1657 North
Purchase. On April 18, 1666, it was voted that a three rail fence be set
up between the purchased lands on the plain "from Goodman Buckland's house
to the Mill River" , separating Bucklin's land from the North Purchase
land.
At Rehoboth, MA, William participated in lot divisions of 1668, for these
meadows north of the town which were referred to as the "North
Purchase." The "North Purchase" was later established(1694) as
the town of Attleboro, in Bristol County, Massachusetts with about 180
inhabitants.
Sources
Source Notes: WILLIAM2 BUCKLIN (JOHN1
BUCKLAND) (Source: (1) Charles Edward Banks, The Winthrop Fleet of 1630,
Genealogical Publishing Co., 1930., (2) James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary,
The First Settlers of New England, Little Brown, Boston (1862)., (3) James
Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, The First Settlers of New England, Little
Brown, Boston (1862), "spelling Buckland, sometimes Buckline, removed
Rehoboth 1658."., (4) Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of
John Winthrop, Little, Brown & Co., 91958)., (5) Charles Henry Pope,
Pioneers of Massachusets, Genealogical Pub Co. (1965), p 76 and p 364., (6)
Susan M Boucher, History of Pawtucket 1635-1976, (Pawtucket Public
Library, Pawtucket, RI 1976), p 37(Rehoboth-Pawtucket early history and Hazell
land)., (7) Susan M Boucher, History of Pawtucket 1635-1976, (Pawtucket
Public Library, Pawtucket, RI 1976), pp. 14-18 (Roger Williams information).)
was born 1609 in Dorset, England, and died 01 September 1683 in Rehoboth,
Bristol, MA (Source: James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, The First Settlers
of New England, Little Brown, Boston (1862).). He married MARY BOSWORTH (Source:
Hattie B. Cooper, Squire Bucklin of Foster, RI. His Ancestors back to William
Hingham Bucklin and His Decendants, Roxbury, MS (1944). Typescript at the New
England Hist. & GeneSociety..) Abt. 1629 in England, daughter of EDWARD
BOSWORTH and MARY.
More Notes and Sources
About WILLIAM BUCKLIN:
Appointed: 03 June 1656, Rehobeth, MA - Grand Juryman (Source: John C.
Erhardt, Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 89.)
Burial: 16 September 1679, Attleboro, MA (Source: Rehoboth Vital Records,
1/56.)
Christening: 23 November 1606, Branscombe, Devon, England (Source: LDS
Ancestral File, Family Group Records, For ANF; 8HDB-NC in LDS ancestral File.)
Contributed: 1676, for King Phillip's War (Source: John C. Erhardt, Rehoboth,
Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 378.)
Court Record: September 1631 (Source: Charles Henry Pope, Pioneers of
Massachusets, Genealogical Pub Co. (1965), p 364.)
Emigration: 1630, England (Source: Charles Edward Banks, The Winthrop Fleet
of 1630, Genealogical Publishing Co., 1930, p.62 ("William Buckland....Servant
of Josiah Plaistow").)
Land Obtained: 1635, Hingham, MA [Source: George Lincoln, History of
Hingham,(1893), ,published by the town in 1893.].
Record: 18 April 1666, Rehobeth, MA - Fence Erected (Source: John C. Erhardt,
Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 176, Disputes about the exact line
of the North Purchase and Bucklin's land lead to a committee chosen to decide
and "there shall be a three railed fence set up and maintained, between the
late purchased land on the north side of the towne, ..from Goodman Buckland's
lands to the Mill river....")
Status: 22 February 1657/58, Freeman of Rehoboth (Source: John C. Erhardt, Rehoboth,
Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 94, "accepted as freemen of the
town...William Buckland.")
Notes for MARY BOSWORTH:
There is a Bosworth Genealogy which gives her birth year as about 1611.
Some suggestions that the Bosworths were Quakers, which may explain William's
early move to Rehoboth, the area of the Williams settlement.
Notes indicating she came on the ship Elizabeth Dorcas fit the facts. The
ship Elizabeth Dorcas left London for New England on 10 Apr 1634 "by John
Winthrop" and sailed back and forth regularly between 1634 and 1639, but
always from London.
Burial: 28 July 1687, Attleboro, MA (Source: Attleboro Town Records.)
Immigration: 1634 (Source: National Genealogical Society Quarterly, England,
Sep 1985.)