Nicholas White

d. 1697 · England

Died 1697

Children include Joseph

Nicholas White was a freeman of Dorchester, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, by 1643. Nothing is known of his birth or his English family. At about that time he married Susanna Foster, who had been born at Wendover in Buckinghamshire. Her stepfather was Jonas Humphrey, a Dorchester tanner who had come from Wendover. Their eldest child, Elizabeth, was born at Dorchester on 9 June 1643.

In August 1647 he bought about twenty acres at Uncaty, the part of Dorchester that became Milton, from Henry Woolcot. He cleared it, broke the ground and built a house. Before he could take a crop off it, a Mr. Hutchinson sued him on an older title and turned him out. He sued Woolcot on his warranty and won forty pounds in bills, and then Woolcot persuaded the General Court to cancel them. In 1656 he petitioned the Court for relief. The committee agreed he had suffered "much wrong and damage" but sent him back to the courts.

By October 1655 he had moved to Taunton, in the Plymouth Colony. In 1657 he took the oath of fidelity there. He became a partner in the Taunton iron works and owned a quarter of a saw mill on Mill River. In 1666 William Witherell and two neighbours sued the mill owners, Nicholas among them, for blocking the herring that ran up the river to the ponds, and the jury made them open a passage.

In 1661 he was one of the sixteen purchasers of Block Island, but he seems to have sold his right almost at once. In 1668 he, his son Nicholas and his son-in-law Samuel Hall bought into the Taunton North Purchase, the tract that became Easton, Mansfield and most of Norton. In 1672 they bought into the South Purchase, which became Dighton and part of Berkley.

He died at Taunton in 1697. His lands were appraised in June 1699 at two hundred and forty two pounds nineteen shillings, and divided among his sons Nicholas, John and Joseph and his daughter Elizabeth.

Children

Joseph White d. 1724

Sources

Lothrop, The Nicholas White Family 1643-1900 (1902), pp. 5-12, citing Massachusetts Archives 38:196-197 and Plymouth Colony records; Records of the Colony of New Plymouth VIII; Savage, Genealogical Dictionary II (Humphrey); F. J. Nicholson, TAG 68 (1993):14-22, as quoted on WikiTree Humphrey-168.

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Cite: Heirology, "Nicholas White (d. 1697)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/nicholas-white-1697-e6247a.