Ancestors

Edward Doty

Edward Doty came to Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620, as a servant of Stephen Hopkins, and he is on the list in Governor Bradford's own hand. Bradford, writing up the passengers in the appendix to his History of Plymouth Plantation, enters the Hopkins household and then adds: "and 2 servants caled Edward Doty and Edward Litster." That is his first appearance anywhere. He is described as a London youth. Little more is known of where he came from or what he was before 1620. He fought in the colony's first duel.

He did not stay a servant. On 6 January 1634/5 he married Faith Clarke at Plymouth. The court record reads: "January 6, 1634. Edward Doten and Fayth Clarke wer maried." The clerk wrote 1634 because the English year then turned on 25 March, so January still belonged to the old year. Faith's family had come out of Ipswich in Suffolk in 1634. Her father was Thurston Clarke, whom the Plymouth clerk wrote as Tristram. The court once sent the two men out together: "Edward Dotey and Tristram Clark, his father in law, are to take Josiah Winslow ... and to view a pcell of land." A pcell is a parcel.

On 12 July 1637 he sold messuages and houses to Richard Derby for a hundred and fifty pounds of lawful money of England, in one of the earliest deeds preserved in the colony records. A messuage is a dwelling with its outbuildings and ground.

All his known children were Faith's. There were six sons, Edward, John, Thomas, Samuel, Joseph and Isaac, and a daughter, Mary. Joseph was born at the end of April 1651 and Mary about 1655.

He made his will on 20 May 1655. It begins "I Edward Dotten senir". He left the land he had bought at Coaksett to his sons, and a double portion of it to his son Edward. His house and his lands at Plymouth went to his wife. John Howland and John Cooke witnessed it.

He died at Plymouth on 23 August 1655. The colony's register reads: "Edward Dotey died the 23 of August, 1655." The following March his widow gave up her right in the Coaksett land to her children. Coaksett lay in old Dartmouth, in what is now Westport. In March 1667 his widow married John Phillips of Marshfield, and between 1667 and 1672 his six sons receipted for their shares of his estate. Mary married Eliezer Churchill of Plymouth in 1688 and died on 11 December 1715.

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Cite: Heirology, "Edward Doty (d. 1655)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/edward-doty-1655-607bbe.