Ancestors

Nathaniel Sutcliffe

d. 1676 · Dedham MA → Medfield MA → Deerfield MA
Died 1676
Children include John, Serj.

Nathaniel Sutcliffe appears first in the records of Dedham in Massachusetts, where he paid three shillings and fourpence for his county rate for the college in the tenth month of 1661. By 1663 he was at Medfield, and the town history has him there doing the plainest sort of work: he and John Bullard sawed four hundred and fifty feet of lumber, by hand and over a saw pit, to be used about the enlargement of the meeting house.

His house at Medfield stood about a hundred rods westerly of the Plympton homestead, on the road to the Long Causeway, which is to say a few minutes' walk from the family he married into. In the spring of 1673 he sold the place to Joseph Bullard and went west to Deerfield with the Plymptons. He is recorded there as a settler of 1673, on the lot afterwards known as Colonel Asa Stebbins's. The Medfield house he had just sold was burned by the Indians at the burning of Medfield and never rebuilt, so inside three years he had lost the home he left and bought into a town that was being fought over.

He was killed on 19 May 1676 at the Falls fight, the dawn attack on the Indian camp above Deerfield in which Captain Turner and a third of his men died on the retreat. He left a widow of thirty one and four children under eleven. Everything the family became afterwards happened in Connecticut, because she took them there.

Sources

Stanley Mixon for the Historic American Buildings Survey, May 1940, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
B. H. Sutliffe, Genealogy of the Sutcliffe-Sutliffe Family in America (1903)

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Cite: Heirology, "Nathaniel Sutcliffe (d. 1676)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nathaniel-sutcliffe-1676-c00629.