Colonial Newbury, Massachusetts

Profile manager: Edgar Richardson [send private message]

The goal of this project is to gather basic information on the early history of Newbury and to identify its early settlers.

Right now this project just has one member, me. I am Edgar Richardson.

I suggest that information entered here should be limited to the colonial period, and should not concern Newburyport or West Newbury following their separation from Newbury respectively in 1764 and 1819.

When setting up this page, I thought it best to separate the citations from the sources—a format that is widely used in Wikipedia—which makes it much easier to make multiple citations from the same source.

Here are some of the first tasks that I think need to be done. I'll be working on them, and could use your help.

• Entering early historic events.
• Adding the names of early settlers and linking to their profiles.
• Linking to related spaces or projects.

When adding links to persons in the table, please take care to respect the table formatting.

Will you join me? Please post a comment here on this page, in G2G using the project tag, or send me a private message. Thanks!

History

Newbury was founded subsequent to an order of General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony dated 6 May 1635.^[1]

"It derives its name from Newbury, a town in Berkshire, England, situated in the south part of the county, on the river Kennet, fifty-six miles west from London. It was so named in honor of the reverend Thomas Parker, who had for some time preached in Newbury, England, before his arrival in America. Till its incorporation in 1635 it was called by its. Indian name, Quascacunquen, a name, which the natives gave, not to the whole territory, (as the word signifies a waterfall,') but to « the falls,' on what is now called the river Parker, on whose banks the first settlers fixed their habitations."^[2]

Early Settlers

The information in the following table has been extracted from the research work of Robert Charles Anderson cited below.<refname=Directory>Anderson, Directory; the PDF Edition has no page numbers, but the information in the above table was extracted from the 56th to the 553rd pages visible in most any PDF reader application.</ref>

The 103 persons in the table came to Massachusetts between 1634 and 1640. All of them may have profiles in the Puritan Great Migration Project here on WikiTree (links are being added). The names of their families and servants are not included. Some of them moved on to other towns, and others not listed below came to Newbury after stopping elsewhere. By sorting the table, you can verify that 19 of the persons listed came from the county of Wiltshire, 12 from Hampshire, 8 from Norfolk, and 5 from Oxfordshire. The origins of most are unknown—at least to the author of the source.

John Saunders (Sanders) of Weeks, Wiltshire, England, settled first in Salisbury, Massachusetts and moved across the Merrimack River to Newbury about 1645.^[3]

Robert Rogers of Cheddar, Somerset, England, settled first in York with the Gorges company by 1640, then Boston, and finally Newbury about 1647.<refname=Directory/>

Citations

1. ↑ Currier, History, page 30
2. ↑ Coffin, Sketch, page 9.
3. ↑ Coffin, Sketch, page 317.

Sources

• Rolfe, Mary Adams. Mary Adams Rolfe Collection; Family Files. Editor and Repository: Museum of Old Newbury, https://www.newburyhistory.org/genealogy-research

• Coffin, Joshua. A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, From 1635 to 1845. Boston: 1845. https://ia800906.us.archive.org/16/items/sketchofhistoryo00coffrich/sketchofhistoryo00coffrich_bw.pdf.

• Currier, John J. History of Newbury, Mass., 1635-1902. Boston: Damrell & Upham (Facsimile reprint by Higginson Book Co, Salem, MA), 1902, https://ia600900.us.archive.org/12/items/historyofnewbury1902curr/historyofnewbury1902curr_bw.pdf

• Currier, John J. Ould Newbury: Historical and Biographical Sketches. Boston: Damrell & Upham, 1896. https://ia802605.us.archive.org/0/items/ouldnewburyhisto00curr/ouldnewburyhisto00curr_bw.pdf.

• Anderson, Robert Charles, FASG. The Great Migration Directory; Immigrants to New England, 1620-1640, a Concise Compendium. Boston: New England Historic Genealogic Society, PDF Edition, 2015. www.americanancestors.org.