SIMON HOYT + WIVES (1) UNKN & (2) SUSANNAH - "The Great Migration Begins.."

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EXCERPTS FROM "THE GREAT MIGRATION BEGINS: IMMIGRANTS TO NEW ENGLAND 1620-1633," compiled by Robert Charles Anderson, Vol. 2, Pages 1029-1033 (Published in 1995 by the New England Historic Genealogical "Society). [Contributed to Ancestry.com by CooperPatton on 14 Jan 2010]:

SIMON HOYT

ORIGIN: West Hatch, Somersetshire

MIGRATION: 1629

FIRST RESIDENCE: Charlestown

REMOVES: Dorchester by 1633, Scituate 1635, Windsor by 1639, Fairfield by 1649, Stamford 1657

CHURCH MEMBERSHIP: On 19 April 1635 "Symeon Hayte and Bernard Lumbard and their wives" joined the church at Scituate [ NEHGR 9:279].

FREEMAN: 18 May 1631 [ MBCR 1:366].

OFFICES: Dorchester fenceviewer, 8 October 1633, 24 May 1634 [ DTR 3, 6].

ESTATE: On 3 April 1633 "Symon Hoite" was responsible for building forty feet of fence at Dorchester, based on ownership of two cows [DTR 2]. On 6 January 1633/4 it is "ordered that the marsh and swamp before Goodman Hosford and Davy Wil[ton] shall be divided among themselves and Symon Hoyte" [DTR 5]. On 2 June 1634 it is "ordered that Goodman Witchfeild and Goodman Hoyte shall have to be divided between them the marsh that lies in the north side of the neck towards Boston over against Mr. Rainsford's house in Boston, being for 8 acres by estimation" [DTR 6]. On 10 February 1634/5 "Simon Hoyte" was ordered to keep one of the bulls in the neck of land [DTR 10]. On 17 April 1635 it is "ordered that the lot of meadow which was Symon Hoyte's next to Boston side joining to John Witchfeild shall be divided betwixt Mr. Rodger Williams and Gyles Gibbes" [DTR 11].

In his accounting of houses built at Scituate, Rev. John Lothrop included "Goodman Haite's" as the sixteenth, about midway in the section of those built between September 1634 and October 1636, and with the annotation "which Mr. Bower hath bought" [NEHGR 10:42].

In the Windsor land inventory on 28 February 1640[/1] "Symon Hoyte" had granted from the plantation for meadow and upland "fourscore acres," also "on the northside of the rivulet fourscore acres, thirty [of?] which is given his son Walter Hoyte from the town" [ WiLR 1:88].

Five of the children of Simon Hoyt gave in receipts for their portions of his estate: Samuel Firman "to my mother Hoyt for all demands from my father's estate," 25 March 1662; "Moses Hoyte of Westchester, discharge to Joshua Hoyt of Stamford," 2 April 1666; "Samuell Hoyte, receipt for portion from father Simon Hoyte," April 1665; "Samuel Finch, receipt for wife's portion from father Simon Hoyte," April 1665; and "Benjamin Hoyte, receipt to brother Joshua Hoyte for portion from father's estate," 27 January [blank] [ TAG 11:34; Gillespie Anc 289].

On 1 February 1674 Moses Hoyt, Joshua Hoyt, Samuel Hoyt, Benjamin Hoyt, Thomas Lyon, Samuel Finch and Samuel Firman came to an agreement "concerning the distribution of the estate of our deceased mother Susanna Bates" [Gillespie Anc 289-90, citing StLR A:61].

BIRTH: By about 1593 based on estimated date of marriage.

DEATH: Stamford 1 September 1657 [TAG 10:44, 45].

MARRIAGE: (1) By 1618 _____ _____; probably died in England not long after 1625.

(2) By about 1632 Susannah _____. (She has been called "Susannah Smith" in many sources, without the evidence given. For an argument that she was not a Smith, see ASSOCIATIONS below.) She married (2) Robert Bates, and died before 1 February 1674.

CHILDREN:

With first wife

i WALTER, bp. West Hatch, Somersetshire, 30 November 1618; m. (1) by about 1642 _____ _____ (eldest child b. about 1642 [ FOOF 1:295]); m. (2) by about 1652 Rhoda (Tinker) (Hobbs) Taylor, daughter of Robert Tinker and widow of Thomas Hobbs and John Taylor [FOOF 1:295; TAG 66:217-18; NEHGR 149:412-13].

ii NICHOLAS, bp. West Hatch 7 May 1620; m. Windsor 12 June 1646 Susanna (_____) Joyce [ Grant 45], widow of William Joyce.

iii ALEXANDER, bp. West Hatch 28 December 1623; no further record.

iv JOHN, b. say 1625; m. (1) by about 1650 _____ _____; m. (2) about 1659 Mary (Brundish) Purdy, widow of Francis Purdy. (John Hoyt's daughters, Mary, who probably married Hachaliah Brown, and Rachel, who married John Horton [not Norton], were apparently born in the early 1650s, as they married men born in the 1640s; we know that the widow of Francis Purdy had married John Hoyt because her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth (Brown) Purdy, in 1678 asked that "my father John Hoit and my brother Thomas Browne might stand overseers, or my brother Hacaliah Browne," but Francis Purdy died in 1658 [FOOF 1:495-96].)

v AGNES, bp. West Hatch 18 October 1626; no further record.

With second wife

vi MARY, b. say 1632; m. by about 1652 Thomas Lyon (their daughter Abigail m. in 1672 [FOOF 1:395]). (The first wife of Thomas Lyon was Martha Johanna Winthrop, daughter of Henry and Elizabeth (Fones) Winthrop, the latter of whom later married ROBERT FEAKE and William Hallett.)

vii MOSES, b. say 1634; m. by 1659 Elizabeth _____ (eldest child Abigail m. by 1679 [FOOF 1:296]).

viii JOSHUA, b. say 1639; m. by 1664 Mary Bell (eldest known child b. Stamford 22 December 1664 [TAG 11:35]; in his 24 May 1689 will Francis Bell named daughter Mary Hoyt [FOOF 1:60]).

ix MIRIAM, b. say 1641; m. Fairfield 25 March 1662 Samuel Firman (or Forman) [FOOF 1:207].

x SAMUEL, b. say 1643; m. (1) Stamford 16 November 1670 (or 1671?) Hannah Holly [TAG 11:33]; m. (2) between 1710 and 1713 Rebecca _____, who d. Stamford 8 December 1713 [Gillespie Anc 291, citing StTR 1:128; TAG 11:92]; m. (3) Stamford 20 September 1714 Hannah Slawson, widow of John Gold [Gillespie Anc 291, citing StTR 1:129; TAG 11:93].

xi BENJAMIN, b. Windsor 2 February 1644[/5] [WiLR 1:19]; m. Stamford 5 January 1670[/1] Hannah Weed [TAG 11:33]. (Several sources state that Benjamin was born at Windsor on 2 February 1644/5; this birth is not recorded at Windsor and, as noted in COMMENTS below, the Hoyt family must have been residing in Fairfield by this date.)

xii SARAH, b. say 1647; m. by about 1663 Samuel Finch, son of JOHN FINCH [Gillespie Anc 147-51].

ASSOCIATIONS: In the list of houses built at Scituate, the twenty-first, built probably just a few months after that of Simon Hoyt, was "The Smiths Goodman Hait's brother" [NEHGR 10:42]. Who this might be has not been learned. This may, however, be the basis for the identification of Hoyt's second wife as Susanna Smith, on the assumption that "The Smiths" intends a surname. But it more likely was meant for the occupation, as a blacksmith was an essential element of each of these new towns, and one frequently finds grants made specifically for the smith or the miller, without stating the name of the person employed in that calling.

COMMENTS: In 1903 Emily Warren Roebling included in The Journal of the Reverend Silas Constant a number of birth, marriage and death records said to pertain to the family of Simon Hoyt, and to be from the parish register of Upway, Dorsetshire. Donald Lines Jacobus and John Insley Coddington questioned these records, because parish registers provide us with baptismal and burial dates rather than birth and death dates, and also because some of the dates were incomplete, lacking the day of the event; despite this, Paul Prindle argued in 1976 for their authenticity [Gillespie Anc 287].

More recently the IGI has led to several entries in the parish register of West Hatch, Somersetshire, which are more appropriate for this family, and which are in direct contradiction with the data published by Roebling. As a result, we reject here all the Upway dates, and also the identification of the first wife of Simon Hoyt.

Without the evidence for the identity of the first wife we might wonder whether Simon Hoyt had more than one wife. The range of years over which Simon Hoyt had children (nearly thirty) and the agreement over the estate of his widow, Susannah (_____) (Hoyt) Bates, which did not include the four older surviving sons, are sufficient evidence that Simon Hoyt was married twice.

Without the Upway dates we have no evidence for daughters Ruth and Deborah, and the sons need to be rearranged. Walter would appear to be the eldest son, for two reasons at least. First, in the Windsor grants of land to his father, there is also a grant to him, at a time when he would recently have come of age. If John were older, we would expect to find him in these land records as well. Second, from the records of Matthew Grant we know that both Walter and Nicholas had married before Simon Hoyt moved to Fairfield, but there is no indication from Windsor records that John had married this early. There is also no evidence for a son Thomas. Prindle lists some records for such a person, but they actually pertain to Thomas Hyatt of Stamford [Gillespie Anc 290; FOOF 1:318]. To add to the confusion, probate documents for Simon Hoyt and Thomas Hyatt are mixed together on the same pages of the Stamford records [TAG 11:34].

The seven children of the second wife must all have been born in the 1630s and 1640s, from about 1632 to about 1647. These records are internally consistent, but do raise a small problem when compared with what little we learn from the records of Scituate and Windsor, the two towns in which Simon Hoyt lived from 1635 to about 1646. Hoyt and his wife were admitted to Scituate church in 1635, but had no children baptized there, and Matthew Grant tells us that Simon Hoyt had two children born during his residence at Windsor [Grant 93]. The two eldest children of this marriage, Mary and Moses, were probably born in Dorchester. The next two, Joshua and Miriam, seem firmly placed as born in the years when the family lived in Windsor. The birth of Benjamin is recorded at Windsor on 2 February 1644[/5], but the dates for Samuel and Sarah are less certain, and seem to cluster around the period from 1645 to 1647, very close to the birth of Benjamin. If Grant is right, then these three must have been born in Fairfield; the solution may be that each of these is a little younger than our estimate, or that the Hoyt family moved to Fairfield as early as 1644. Either Grant is in error as to the number of children born in Windsor, or Benjamin wasn't really born in Windsor, but had his birth recorded there perhaps because he had elder brothers still living in that town.

Simon Hoyt settled at Charlestown in 1629 [ ChTR 2]. On 7 May 1640 "Symon Hoyette and his family are to be freed from watch & ward until there be further order taken by the court" [ RPCC 11; CCCR 1:49].