Richard Sears

1595-1676 · Plymouth MA → Marblehead MA → Yarmouth MA

Born 1595, England, parish unknown

Died 1676

Children include Deborah

He was assessed nine shillings in the Plymouth tax list of 25 March 1633 and left off the list the next year, and by 1637 he was at Marblehead, rated among the inhabitants there and granted four acres where he had planted formerly. By 1639 he had moved again to Yarmouth and taken the oath of fidelity, and he stayed. A husbandman; propounded for freemanship in 1652 and admitted in 1653; grand jury 1652, tax collector 1658/9, constable of Yarmouth 1660, deputy for the town in 1662. His inventory lists one Great Bible and other books at one pound three shillings.

In November 1664 Alice Bradford, the governor's widow, sold him two tracts of twenty acres each at Sasuet, one of which had been her husband's own lot.

His will of 10 May 1667 gives the upland to his younger son Silas, subject to his son in law Zachariah Paddock keeping his house and two acres for as long as Deborah lives; everything else to the elder son Paul; and all of it to his wife Dorothy for her natural life, she to be sole executrix. He entreats his brother Thacher and Thacher's two sons to be friends in trust. Nine years later he added a codicil, and John Thacher afterwards deposed that when his uncle signed it he asked him to redraw the whole will and leave out the land given to Ichabod Paddock, saying he had answered it another way. Thacher never produced the new draft, so a grandson kept a legacy the testator had asked to have struck out.

What he was in England nobody knows, and the standard authority says so in one word. That vacancy is what the nineteenth century filled.

Children

Deborah Sears (1639-1732)

Sources

Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620-1633 (Boston: NEHGS, 1995), vol. III, RICHARD SEARS, pp. 1642 and 1643 · archive.org greatmigrationbe0003ande, leaves 111 and 112

Frederick Freeman, The History of Cape Cod (1860), vol. II, p. 591 · Records of the Griswold, Crane, Paddock, Howes, Smith and Russell Families (1898), pp. 27 and 28 · Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins (1995), vol. III, p. 1644

Samuel Pearce May, The Descendants of Richard Sares (Sears) of Yarmouth, Mass., 1638-1888 (Albany, 1890), pp. 4 and 15 · archive.org descendantsofric00mays, leaves 20 and 34

Samuel Pearce May, The Descendants of Richard Sares (Sears) of Yarmouth, Mass., 1638-1888 (Albany, 1890), pp. 18 to 19 · archive.org descendantsofric00mays, leaves 37 and 38

Samuel P. May, The Descendants of Richard Sares (Sears) of Yarmouth, Mass., 1638-1888 (Albany, 1890), pp. 32 and 33 · archive.org descendantsofric00mays, leaves 51 and 52

Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England 1620-1633 (1995), vol. III, RICHARD SEARS, pp. 1642 to 1644

Samuel Pearce May, The Descendants of Richard Sares (Sears) of Yarmouth, Mass., 1638-1888 (Albany, 1890), the English Ancestry chapter, pp. 4 to 20

If Richard Sears is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Richard Sears (1595-1676)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/richard-sears-1595-1676-c4129b.