Joan (Barton) Smith (1599 - 1644)

Born 1599 in Gloucester, Gloucestershire, England

Wife of Richard Smith Sr. — married 28 May 1621 in Thornbury, Gloucestershire

Descendants

Died 1644 at about age 45 in Wickford, Rhode Island

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Joan (Barton) Smith migrated to New England during the Puritan Great Migration (1621-1640). Join: Puritan Great Migration Project Discuss: pgm

Biography

Joan Barton was born by 1601 in Gloucestershire, England, daughter of William Barton and Ellioner Burnell. She might have been the child baptized in October 1603.

While she is not mentioned in the will of her father (she'd probably already received her marriage portion), she is identified in the 1645 will of her mother which includes a bequest "unto Joane Smith my eldest daughter, Five shillings if ever she come to England to receive it."^[1]

She married 28 May 1621 in Thornbury, Richard Smith.^[2]

She died by 6 Oct 1651, probably in Rhode Island, when Roger Williams wrote that Richard Smith was about to marry "Mrs Chester."^[3]

"Mrs. Chester" was the widow Mary Chester, former wife of Mr. Leonard Chester of Wethersfield, Conn. [Brandon and Mahler] add that Updike (Daniel Updike, Richard Smith, First English Settler of the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island, 1937) mistakenly attributed this courtship of Mrs. Chester to Richard Smith Jr. who was much younger than she.

"Of Richard Smith's wife Joan one tradition only survives, o a very practical nature. She is said to have brought from Gloucestershire a recipe for making cheese, and from that recipe all the Narragansett cheeses were made for years afterwards. She died before her husband, but the time and place of her death are not recorded." ^[4]

Sources

1. ↑ John C. Brandon and Leslie Mahler, FASG. "English ancestry of Joan Barton, wife of Richard Smith of Narragansett, Rhode Island" in The American Genealogist 84 (2010) pp. 261-2, citing Consistory Court of Gloucester, original wills for 1646
2. ↑ Gloucestershire Archives; Gloucester, Gloucestershire; Gloucestershire Church of England Parish Registers; Reference Number: P330 in 1/3
3. ↑ Brandon and Mahler (2010), p 262, citing The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1988.
4. ↑ Daniel Berkeley Updike, Richard Smith: First Settler of the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island, (Boston: The Merrymount Press, 1937), 22; images, Internet Archive, (https://archive.org/details/richardsmithfirs00updi : accessed 23 Oct 2022).