Ancestors

Joseph Kingsbury

Joseph Kingsbury was born about 1601, probably at Boxford in Suffolk. His baptism is not in the Boxford register, which records only two or three of his father's children. His place in the family comes from his father's will of 1622. It names eight children, and Joseph is the sixth, after his sister Elizabeth and before his brother Thomas, who was then under twenty-one.

His father was very probably James Kingsbury of Boxford, a yeoman, which meant a farmer who held land of his own. James made his will in April 1622 and was buried at Boxford that month. The will leaves "To Joseph Kingsberie, my son, certain furniture and other things". It also names his brothers James, Henry, John and Thomas, his sisters Sara, Elizabeth and Alyce, and his father's wife Anne. She had married James at Boxford in 1584 as Anne Francis, so Joseph, born within that marriage, was almost certainly her son.

No single record says that this Joseph is the Joseph Kingsbury who settled at Dedham in Massachusetts. The case rests on his brothers. John Kingsbury of Dedham made his will in December 1659 and named "Bro: Josiph" and "the children of my Brother Joseph". Both of the Dedham brothers called Henry Kingsbury of Ipswich, Massachusetts, their "kinsman", and that Henry was the grandson Henry named in the 1622 will. Kingsbury and Talcott, the family's genealogists, made the identification in 1905. Robert Charles Anderson, writing in The Great Migration in 2005, thought it "may well be correct" but wanted more evidence. An article by Byrne and Hardy in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 2021 accepts it.

Joseph and his brother John were in New England by 1637. On 18 July that year Ezekiel Holliman asked leave to turn over land at the new town of Dedham to "John Kingsbury and Joseph his brother". Joseph signed the Dedham Covenant, the agreement by which the first settlers bound themselves together as a town. He was living at Dedham by 23 November 1638.

His wife was Millicent. Her maiden name is not known. Older books call her Ames or Eames, but the Millicent Eames they mean married William Sprague. Their daughter Mary was born at Dedham on 1 September 1637, and the town clerk entered her as "the Daughter of Joseph & Millecent Kingsbury". Elizabeth followed on 14 September 1638, Joseph on 17 February 1640/1, John on 15 August 1643, Eleazer on 17 May 1645 and Nathaniel on 26 March 1650. Until 1752 the English year began in March, so a February date is written with both years. An elder daughter, Sarah, had been born in England about 1632. No record names Sarah's mother. Millicent was Joseph's wife by 1637, and no other wife of his is known.

In 1638 the Dedham settlers set about gathering a church. A Puritan church of the time took in only those who could satisfy its members that God's grace had worked in them. The Dedham men began with a small company who tried one another's cases, to settle who was fit to be the "foundation" of the church. They met many times that year, "sometimes spending ye time in fasting & prayer". Joseph was one of those tried.

The church book, printed in 1888, sets down what happened. The company thought well of him "in ye maine", but was told he was "too much addicted to ye world". He answered some of the charges and could not clear himself of others, and they left him with "a gentle exhortation". Through the months that followed he stayed, in the book's words, "stiffe & unhumbled". When the company pressed for an end, he turned on one of them in "a distempered passionate flying out". At that they "gave him wholy o'vr", and left his case to the church once it was gathered.

Millicent was received before him. She was the fifth person admitted after the church was gathered, before its elders were chosen in April 1639. The church saw her as "a tender harted soule full of feares & temptations, but truly breathing after Christ". Only the children of members could be baptised, so the Kingsbury children were baptised through her. Mary and Elizabeth were among the first children baptised in the Dedham church, entered as the daughters of "our sister", the wife of Joseph Kingsbury. Their son Joseph was baptised on 21 February 1640/1, four days old, as "ye sone of our sister Kingsbury wife of Jospeph Kingsbury".

Joseph was received into the church on 9 April 1641, nearly three years after the founders had given him over. On 2 June 1641 he was made a freeman of the colony. In Massachusetts only church members could become freemen, and only freemen could vote in the colony's elections.

A modern account says that part of his land at Dedham, with land of Nicholas Phillips, went to make the town's first burying ground, now the Old Village Cemetery.

His children married into the towns around Dedham. Sarah married Robert Crossman, a drum-maker, at Dedham on 25 May 1652 and went with him to Taunton. Mary married Thomas Cooper of Rehoboth. Elizabeth married Nathaniel Brewer of Roxbury and died on 25 June 1661. John married Elizabeth Fuller in 1666 and died on 30 May 1669. Joseph moved to Wrentham before 1670, and that settlement was broken up and abandoned in King Philip's War. Eleazer and Nathaniel stayed at Dedham.

On 22 May 1675 he made his will, dating it "the twenty two day of the third month called May". He was "by daily infirmities minded of my mortality yet by the mercy of God of sound understanding & memory". He had already given his two eldest sons, Joseph and John, their portions. Millicent was to have the use of the whole estate until their son Eleazer married, and a home in the house for the rest of her life after that. Sarah, married at Taunton, was left five pounds. The house, barns and most of the land went to Eleazer and Nathaniel.

He died at Dedham in 1676. The town's record of deaths has "Joseph Kingsbury, deceased, 76", and the day has been lost. His will was proved the same year.

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Cite: Heirology, "Joseph Kingsbury (1601-1676)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joseph-kingsbury-1601-1676-7ac905.