Margaret Sheafe

1598-1682 · Cranbrook, England

Born 1598, Cranbrook, Kent, England

Died 1682

Children include Johanna

Margaret Sheafe married Robert Kitchell, one of the first planters of Guilford, Connecticut. On 21 June 1631 he took out a licence at Canterbury to marry her. The licence calls her "Margaret Sheafe of Tenterden, v., about 30", a spinster living at Tenterden in the Kent Weald, and him "of Rolvenden, yeom., widr." So she was born about 1601 and was his second wife.

Robert's mother Joan had married Dr. Edmund Sheafe of Cranbrook in 1610, so Margaret married into a family she was already part of. Who her own father was is not settled. A compiled database of Kent families gives her baptism at St Dunstan's, Cranbrook, on 21 May 1598, as a daughter of Richard Sheafe and Margery Roberts, Richard being Dr. Sheafe's brother. A family history of 1917 makes her Dr. Sheafe's own daughter by his first wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who was buried at Woodchurch in March 1599. The Guilford historian Bernard Steiner, writing in 1897, called her "Mrs. Margaret, wife of Mr. Robert Kitchell" and supposed her a sister of Jacob Sheafe, Dr. Sheafe's youngest son.

The Kent database and the 1917 history date the wedding 21 July 1632. Their children were baptized at St Mary's, Rolvenden: Robert on 4 October 1632, Harman on 27 April 1634, Samuel on 6 December 1635, and Joan on 27 May 1638. The Rolvenden register enters Samuel as "son of Robert Kitchell and Margaret his wife".

In 1639 she sailed with her husband in the company of the Rev. Henry Whitfield. Theirs was the first ship ever to anchor at New Haven. They settled at Guilford, where her husband was a leading man for twenty-five years. In 1666 they moved with the New Haven Colony migration to Newark, New Jersey. Robert died there about 1672.

Margaret spent her last years with her daughter Johanna and her son-in-law, the Rev. Jeremiah Peck, who became Greenwich's first settled minister in 1678. She died at Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1682.

Children

Johanna Kitchell (1638-1711)

Sources

Bernard C. Steiner, A History of the Plantation of Menunkatuck and of the Original Town of Guilford, Connecticut (Baltimore, 1897), archive.org historyofplantat00steiuoft, p. 26.

Bernard C. Steiner, A History of the Plantation of Menunkatuck and of the Original Town of Guilford, Connecticut (Baltimore, 1897), archive.org historyofplantat00steiuoft, p. 42.

J. M. Cowper, ed., Canterbury Marriage Licences, Second Series, 1619-1660 (Canterbury, 1894), p. 583, archive.org canterburymarria02cant.

A History of the Willis Family of New England and New Jersey (1917), p. 195, archive.org historyofwillisf00will.

A History of the Willis Family of New England and New Jersey (1917), p. 224, archive.org historyofwillisf00will.

A History of the Willis Family of New England and New Jersey (1917), p. 226, archive.org historyofwillisf00will.

Bernard C. Steiner, A History of the Plantation of Menunkatuck and of the Original Town of Guilford, Connecticut (Baltimore, 1897), archive.org historyofplantat00steiuoft, p. 42; Darius Peck, A Genealogical Account of the Descendants in the Male Line of William Peck (Hudson, New York, 1877), archive.org genealogicalacco00inpeck, p. 9, note; The Weald of Kent, Surrey and Sussex database, theweald.org, Robert Kitchell, record 398378. J. M. Cowper, ed., Canterbury Marriage Licences, Second Series, 1619-1660 (Canterbury, 1894), p. 583, archive.org canterburymarria02cant. Willis, A History of the Willis Family of New England and New Jersey (1917), pp. 195-196, 223-226, archive.org historyofwillisf00will. Woodchurch and Tenterden parish registers, FreeREG transcriptions.

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Cite: Heirology, "Margaret Sheafe (1598-1682)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margaret-sheafe-1598-1682-8cb59c.