Gerard Spencer

b. 1576 · Stotfold, England

Born 1576, Stotfold, Bedfordshire, England

Father: Michael Spencer

Mother: Elizabeth Spencer

Children include William, Ens.

Gerard Spencer was baptised at Stotfold in Bedfordshire on 20 May 1576. The clerk wrote his name "Gerat" and named both his parents, Michael and Elizabeth Spencer. He was the first of their children baptised at Stotfold, where the family had moved from the neighbouring parish of Edworth a few years before.

On 10 November 1600 he married Alice Whitbread at Upper Gravenhurst. She was a daughter of John and Eleanor Whitbread, a family of some standing there. In 1611 Gerard and his brother-in-law William Whitbread sold to John Whitbread a large holding: eleven houses, a pigeon house, gardens and orchards, two hundred acres of arable, two hundred of meadow and sixty of pasture, in Shillington, Upper and Lower Gravenhurst, Flitton, Silsoe, Elstow, Kempston and Stotfold.

Nine children were baptised to him at Stotfold. William came first, on 11 October 1601. Then Elizabeth in 1602, who married a Tomlins; John in January 1603/4; Henry in 1605, who died at two; Thomas on 29 March 1607; Richard in 1608, who died at five; a son buried in March 1609/10; Michael on 5 May 1611; and Gerard on 25 April 1614.

Four of those sons, William, Thomas, Michael and Gerard, went to New England in the 1630s. William and Thomas were among the first settlers of Hartford. Michael settled at Lynn. Gerard lived at Cambridge and Lynn and became one of the first settlers of Haddam on the Connecticut River.

Gerard Spencer may have left Stotfold for London some years before his sons emigrated. His younger brother Richard had become a prosperous haberdasher there. Gerard was dead by 1646, when Richard's will called him "brother Jarrard Spencer deceased."

Parents

Michael Spencer

Elizabeth Spencer (d. 1599)

Children

William Spencer b. 1601 Ens. Gerard Spencer b. 1614

Sources

F. G. Emmison, ed., Bedfordshire Parish Registers, vol. 38, Stotfold, p. A2, archive.org bedfordshirepari38bedf

F. G. Emmison, ed., Bedfordshire Parish Registers, vol. 38, Stotfold, p. A3, archive.org bedfordshirepari38bedf

F. G. Emmison, ed., Bedfordshire Parish Registers, vol. 38, Stotfold, p. A4, archive.org bedfordshirepari38bedf

Donald Lines Jacobus, "The Four Spencer Brothers," The American Genealogist 27 (1951), p. 82, archive.org sim_american-genealogist_1951-04_27_2

Donald Lines Jacobus, "The Four Spencer Brothers," The American Genealogist 27 (1951), p. 84, archive.org sim_american-genealogist_1951-04_27_2

Clarence Almon Torrey, "The Whitbread Family," The American Genealogist 32 (1956), p. 136, archive.org sim_american-genealogist_1956-07_32_3

F. G. Emmison, ed., Bedfordshire Parish Registers, vol. 38, Stotfold, baptisms pp. A2-A4 and burials p. A38, archive.org bedfordshirepari38bedf; Donald Lines Jacobus, "The Four Spencer Brothers," The American Genealogist 27 (1951), pp. 80-84, archive.org sim_american-genealogist_1951-04_27_2; Clarence Almon Torrey, "The Whitbread Family," The American Genealogist 32 (1956), pp. 133-136, archive.org sim_american-genealogist_1956-07_32_3

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Cite: Heirology, "Gerard Spencer (b. 1576)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/gerard-spencer-1576-203867.