John Boynton
John Boynton was born in 1614 at Knapton, a hamlet in the parish of Wintringham in the East Riding of Yorkshire. He was a tailor by trade. In 1638 he sailed for New England with his older brother William, and the two of them settled at Rowley.
Rowley was not settled the way most New England towns were. It did not fill up gradually with families drifting out from an older settlement. It arrived all at once, as a congregation. The Reverend Ezekiel Rogers brought about twenty families out of the East Riding of Yorkshire, landed at Salem in 1638, and bought a stretch of ground between Ipswich and Newbury. They named the place for the Yorkshire parish most of them had left. John Boynton and his brother came over in that company, and Knapton, where he was born, lies in the same riding.
The town laid itself out in house lots, and in 1640 he was assigned an acre and a half on Bradford Street. William's lot was the one next to his. An acre and a half was a small holding even at Rowley, where the lots were modest by design, and he tilled it rather than farming for a living. His trade was the tailoring.
He appears in the county records once in his own voice. In 1662 he gave a deposition concerning the will of William Bellingham and stated his age as forty eight, which is the evidence that fixes his birth year.
He married Ellen Pell in 1643. She had been living in Boston, in service in the household of Atherton Hough, and the Boston church dismissed her to Rowley that August so that she could marry him. They had seven children who lived to be named in his will.
He was buried on 18 February 1670. His will, dated 8 February and proved on 28 March of the following year, names his wife Ellen, his brother William, his sons Joseph, Caleb, Samuel and John, and his daughters Mercy, Hannah and Sarah. His widow married twice more and outlived him by nineteen years.
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Cite: Heirology, "John Boynton (1614-1670)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-boynton-1614-1670-e8b384.