John Bass
John Bass was baptised at St Mary the Virgin, Saffron Walden, in Essex, in the autumn of 1630. One reading of the register gives 18 September, another 18 October. He was a son of Samuel Bass and Ann Savell, who had married in the same church in 1625.
In 1633 his parents took him to Roxbury in New England, and about 1640 to Braintree. There his father was ordained the first deacon of the church.
On 3 February 1658 he married Ruth Alden, a daughter of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower. The Braintree town clerk wrote "John Bass and Ruth Aulden were maried the 12 mo. 3, 1657, by Mr. John Aulden of Duxbury". The year then began in March, so the twelfth month of 1657 was February of what is now counted as 1658. The man who married them was the bride's father. In the New England colonies a marriage was a civil act, performed by a magistrate rather than a minister, and John Alden served as one.
John and Ruth had six children recorded at Braintree: John on 26 November 1658, Samuel on 25 March 1660, Joseph on 5 December 1665, Hannah on 22 June 1667, Mary on 11 February 1670 and Sarah on 29 March 1672. A 1940 genealogy of the Bass family also gives them a daughter Ruth, born about 1662.
Ruth died on 12 October 1674. Her youngest child, Sarah, was two. On 21 September 1675 John married Hannah Sturtevant of Plymouth. The clerk wrote "John Bass, & Hannah Stirdephant were maried 7th mo. 21 '75 by Mr Suthward".
He was a wheelwright, a maker and mender of wheels and carts. He held land at Stand-brook in Salter's Farm, at Rye Island and in the Plain Lot of Braintree.
He made his will on 25 June 1716 and died at Braintree on 12 September 1716. The clerk gave his age as about eighty-four; his baptism makes him nearly eighty-six. An abstract printed in the Mayflower Descendant notes that he had "survived his wife Ruth Alden nearly forty-two years". His son Samuel received his lands at Stand-brook in Salter's Farm, half of his lands at Rye Island and part of the Plain Lot.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "John Bass (1630-1716)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-bass-1630-1716-116e03.