Daniel Shed of Finchingfield
Daniel Shed was a yeoman of Finchingfield in the north of Essex, born there about 1596. His baptism does not survive, because the parish register only begins in 1617. He was the eldest son of Thomas Shed, the first of the family to settle at Finchingfield. Thomas came in from Thaxted a generation earlier and is called Old Thomas Shed in the register. Every Shed in the parish in the seventeenth century descended from him. Daniel was probably named for his uncle Daniel, a son of Thomas Shedd of Great Easton.
The Finchingfield register is still perfectly preserved. It enters four children to him and his wife Sarah between 1618 and 1626: Martha, Daniel, Sarah and Susan. The second of them is his son Daniel, and the clerk wrote it out in full: 1620. Baptizinges. June 25. Daniel Shead sonne of Daniel Shead & Sarah. The font that held the water is still in use in the church. His daughter Sarah married Ralph Bird in the same church in 1639.
He lived for a time in the manor of Cornish Hall, about three miles north of the church. In May 1627 the manor court entered him with James Chaplyn as assessor of fines, the two men who set what the manor's offenders paid. From 1631 to 1635 he was questman of Finchingfield church, the officer who reported absentees and misbehaviour to the churchwardens.
His father was buried on 9 September 1637 leaving a husbandman's will. Daniel was his sole executor and took all the goods, while his brother and two sisters had twelvepence apiece. In no Finchingfield record is this Daniel called senior. If the identification holds, he is the father from whom the New England family takes its name. His son Daniel never appears again in the parish, and is taken to be the man who reached Braintree in Massachusetts by 1642. That join is an inference, not a document.
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Cite: Heirology, "Daniel Shed of Finchingfield (b. 1596)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/daniel-shed-of-finchingfield-1596-a84fb0.