Joan Smith

b. 1623 · Thornbury, England

Born 1623, Thornbury, Gloucestershire, England

Father: Richard Smith

Mother: Joan Barton

Children include Capt.

Joan Smith was baptised at Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, in January 1623/4. That is January 1624 by the modern reckoning, since the English year then began in March. She was the eldest child of Richard Smith and Joan Barton, who had married in the same church in May 1621. The Thornbury register names her sponsors: "Johan Smyth was baptized. Witnesses: William Barton, John Smyth and Katheren Smyth." William Barton was a kinsman of her mother, probably her brother, who lived at Moreton, about a mile from Thornbury church.

Four more children followed at Thornbury: Katherine, baptised in August 1627, James in December 1629, Richard in December 1630, and Elizabeth on 18 March 1631/2. Then her father, as Roger Williams later put it, "for his conscience toward God, left a fair possession in Glocestershire, and adventured with his relations and estate to New England". The family settled first at Taunton, in Plymouth Colony. From there her father moved them to the Narragansett country, where about 1639 he built the first English house among the Narragansett people, at Cocumscussoc near Wickford. Her father also spent time at New Amsterdam under the Dutch, and in 1645 he was one of the Eight Men, a board of settlers chosen to advise the Dutch governor.

In the spring of 1648, when she was about twenty four, she married Thomas Newton of Fairfield, a widower, at Flushing on Long Island. Her parents had not agreed to it, and the sheriff who married them had no authority to do so. The government of New Netherland declared the marriage void, fined the couple and the sheriff, and ordered them to marry again after banns. They did, at New Amsterdam on 10 April 1648, before the Director General and Council and in the presence of her father, who had made his peace with the match.

Two years later her husband was jailed at Fairfield on a capital charge. He broke out and took refuge with the Dutch. The family lived on Long Island, where Thomas was the sheriff of Middelburgh in 1653 and bought land in 1656. She had four children: Abigail, born about 1654, Israel, James and Thomas.

She died young, before her father made his will. Richard Smith left a quarter of his estate to the "Children of deceased daughter Joan, sometime wife to Thomas Newton". Through that bequest her sons held land on Boston Neck in Kingstown, Rhode Island. Her daughter Abigail married her cousin Lodowick Updike, a son of her sister Katherine.

Parents

Joan Barton Richard Smith 1596-1666

Children

Capt. James Newton 1654-1739

Sources

Clair Alonzo Newton, The Colchester, Conn., Newton Family: Descendants of Thomas Newton of Fairfield, Conn., 1639 (1911), p. 3, quoting Albany Records VII, 141-145, and E. B. O'Callaghan, History of New Netherland II, 222; archive.org colchesterconnne01newt, leaf 32

Clair Alonzo Newton, The Colchester, Conn., Newton Family: Descendants of Thomas Newton of Fairfield, Conn., 1639 (1911), p. 4, printing Roger Williams's testimony of July 1679 (Rhode Island Colonial Records III, 57); archive.org colchesterconnne01newt, leaf 34

Daniel Berkeley Updike, Richard Smith, First English Settler of the Narragansett Country, Rhode Island (Boston, 1937), p. 4, quoting Phillimore's Register of Thornbury; archive.org richardsmithfirs00updi, leaf 27

Daniel Berkeley Updike, Richard Smith, First English Settler of the Narragansett Country (1937), pp. 3-4, quoting Phillimore's Register of Thornbury (archive.org richardsmithfirs00updi); Clair Alonzo Newton, The Colchester, Conn., Newton Family (1911), pp. 3-6, quoting Albany Records VII, 141-145 (archive.org colchesterconnne01newt); J. O. Austin, Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island, p. 185

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Cite: Heirology, "Joan Smith (b. 1623)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joan-smith-1623-fe6d29.