My tenth great grandfather, referred to in A Family Record of Dr. Samuel Adams, United Empire Loyalist of Vermont and Upper Canada as “William Adams of Ipswich” (1594-1661). Ipswich, a British town of Anglo-Saxon origin, up the coast from London, set in the heart of Suffolk, and said to be one of England’s oldest still-continuing towns. Around the time of William’s birth, there was but echo of the friaries and priories closed by Henry VIII, with the newly-christened Christchurch Mansion on the site of one of these dismantled Augustinian priories. Queen Mary had burnt Protestants at the stake at Ipswich, nine individuals who became known as the Ipswich Martyrs. The wool trade was booming, with a rich trade between various points on the European continent. Ipswich was also a bookselling and printing centre, and Henry R. Plomer’s A Short History of English Printing 1476-1900 (1900) writes of an array of printers who established themselves there, including Antholy Scoloker in 1547, and both John Overton and John Oswen the following year. Printing, among other things, suggests, I would think, a certain degree of literacy.
From the time William Adams would have been seventeen years old, Ipswich was at least twenty years a major centre for emigration to New England. It is through this that Ipswich, Massachusetts was founded, and a promontory christened “Castle Hill” after a similar headland in England. Ipswich was also one of the main ports of embarkation for the Puritans leaving other East Anglian towns and Villages during the 1630s for what became known as the Great Migration, heading across the Atlantic as part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
“Our first certain knowledge of William Adams is his presence at Cambridge,” A Family Record of Dr. Samuel Adams, United Empire Loyalist of Vermont and Upper Canada offers, “then known as the New Towne, in 1635.” Official records for Massachusetts show the name as “New Towne” for the first time in 1632, evolving into “Newtowne” by 1638. The Historical Marker Database website speaks of this as a period during which included the founding of Harvard, and those early days of what would become Boston.
The Puritans of Lincolnshire and East Anglia, England, in anticipation of their emigration to New England, organized the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1628, and obtained a grant of the territory between the Merrimac and the Charles Rivers from King Charles I for their settlement. They chose John Winthrop as Governor, Thomas Dudley as Deputy Governor, and “the Assistants,” who together acted as a kind of executive committee or council in the negotiations of July and August, 1629 for a transfer of the government of the Colony from the Company in Britain to the settlers in Massachusetts (recorded October 15, 1629).
In April and May, 1630, seventeen vessels with “nearly 1,000 souls” sailed from Britain preceded on March 29, 1630 by the Arbella, with Winthrop, Dudley, and the Assistants, which landed in Salem on June 22, 1630. They settled in Charlestown about July 1st and organized what is now known as the First Church of Boston on August 27, 1630. At this same time other arrivals settled in Watertown, in Medford, and in Dorchester. (Thomas Graves had built a house on Graves Neck in what is now East Cambridge in 1629.) When problems of water supply were encountered in Charlestown, Winthrop, Dudley, and the Assistants accepted the invitation of the hermit William Blackstone to move to Trimountain, which they renamed Boston on September 17, 1630.
As the Adams volume, itself, offers that “William was made a Freeman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony on 22 May 1639. He was a commoner of Ipswich 31 January 1642, which shows that he had removed to that town some time before, in 1641. He was one of the selectmen of Ipswich in 1646. He is most frequently of record as a Juryman, and he served continuously in that capacity with little interruption until 1659.” So much of genealogy is the ability to understand information, and much of this paragraph remains obscure, at least to my understanding. The Collins Dictionary online offers “juryman” as “a member of a jury, esp. a man,” which has the ability to somehow be informative without saying much of anything. The same website offers “selectmen” as “any of the members of the local boards of most New England towns.” What does it mean to be of a place? “Of Ipswich” [emphasis mine], although not necessarily from Ipswich. Potentially a town he only made his way through, as the write-up on William Adams continues:
William Adams was granted twelve acres of land 27 February 1644, “beyond Mr. Appletons his farme near to the Land of the Widdow Stacye as may be convenient to be laide out by Mr. Appleton, John Whipple, and the lott layers.” On 19 July 1654 William Payne of Ipswich, merchant, sold to William Adams of the same place, miller, six and three quarter acres of marsh for nine pounds. (It is possible that this transaction was with [his eldest son] William Adams).
This land was on the Ipswich River, on the site of what became Hamilton, Massachusetts. The farm which he cultivated there remained in the family for over two hundred and fifty years.
William Adams is commonly identified as having been born at Wem, Shropshire, England, in 1594. Some early genealogists confused him with his son William Adams who was born in 1620. However, his discharge from compulsory military service in the Colony in 1647 rules this out: he would not have been of sufficient age had his birthday been as late as 1620. He is believed to be the youngest son of Thomas and Margaret (Erpe) Adams, of Wem, born 3 February 1594, and baptized 10 February 1594 in the parish church at Wem. The evidence, taken from parish records, seems plausible; but we have seen no independent substantiating evidence which would provide solid proof.
William of Ipswich was also putatively a brother of Sir Thomas Adams, born about 1586, one-time Lord Mayor of London, who was a staunch Royalist. Here again, a lack of corroborating evidence exists. At this time, therefore, we regard the European origins of William of Ipswich as indeterminate.