Ancestors

Rev. William Witherell

William Witherell was born about 1600. He was educated at Bennet College, Cambridge, the college now called Corpus Christi. He took his B.A. in January 1623 and his M.A. in 1626. He then kept the school at Maidstone, in Kent. His son Daniel was born there on 29 November 1630.

On 14 March 1635 the mayor of Maidstone gave him a certificate to leave England. He sailed from Sandwich in the Hercules, a ship of two hundred tons under John Witherley, master. The list of her passengers enters "Will. Witherell of Maidstone schoolmaster and Mary his wife", with three children and one servant. Each family had brought a certificate from its minister of its conversation and conformity to the church, and had taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, which acknowledged the king and his headship of the Church of England.

In New England he went back to teaching. He kept the grammar school at Charlestown in 1635 and at Cambridge for the next two years. In 1638 he bought a house at Duxbury, in Plymouth Colony, from Edward Hall, and he had a grant of land there in 1640. He preached at Duxbury.

In 1645 the dissenters of Scituate invited him to be the minister of their new second church. They had broken with Charles Chauncy, the minister of the first church, over baptism. He was ordained on 2 September 1645, in Deane's words "in the face of all opposition" from Chauncy and the elders of Plymouth.

He stayed with that church for the rest of his life. From 7 September 1645 he kept its register of baptisms in his own hand. In 1674 he had a paralytic stroke, and from then on the entries are in another hand.

His children were Daniel, born at Maidstone in 1630, who settled at New London; John; Samuel; Theophilus; Mary; Elizabeth; Sarah; and Hannah, born on 20 February 1647. Mary was probably born in England and was probably one of the three children on the Hercules. She married Thomas Oldham on 20 November 1656. Elizabeth married a Bryant on 22 December 1657, and Sarah married Israel Hobart of Hingham in January 1670. Theophilus was a sergeant in the great Narragansett swamp fight of 19 December 1675 and was severely wounded there.

He kept writing into old age. At eighty he was still composing funeral elegies, and Deane prints one that he signed "William Witherell, Octogenarius", meaning a man in his eighties. He died at Scituate on 9 April 1684, aged about eighty four.

Scituate kept a tradition that his mother was a daughter of John Rogers, the Smithfield martyr. Rogers was the first Protestant burned under Queen Mary, at Smithfield in London in 1555. Deane gives it as a tradition only.

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Cite: Heirology, "Rev. William Witherell (1600-1684)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/rev-william-witherell-1600-1684-fac3ae.