Ancestors

Robert Kitchell

Robert Kitchell came from Kent, in the south of England. He was baptized at St Mary's, Hayes, on 25 October 1601, the son of John Kitchell and Joan Jordan, according to a compiled database of Kent families. His father seems to have died while he was a baby. His mother married twice more, and in 1610, when he was nine, she became the wife of Dr. Edmund Sheafe of Cranbrook. Dr. Sheafe's children became his stepbrothers and stepsisters, among them Dorothy, who married the Rev. Henry Whitfield, Joanna, who married William Chittenden, and Jacob, born in 1616.

In 1625 Dr. Sheafe made his will and named "Robert Kitchell, now of Cranbrooke, my wife's eldest son" as one of its overseers. By 1631 he was a yeoman of Rolvenden, a parish a few miles south of Cranbrook, and a widower. His first wife's name is not known. On 21 June 1631 he took out a licence at Canterbury to marry "Margaret Sheafe of Tenterden", a spinster of about thirty. A family history of 1917 and the Kent database date the wedding 21 July 1632. Their children were baptized at Rolvenden: Robert in October 1632, Harman in April 1634, Samuel in December 1635, and Joan, or Johanna, in May 1638.

He belonged to the company that followed the Rev. Henry Whitfield out of England in 1639. Many of them were well educated, and some were connected with leading Puritans of the day. They sailed in the spring of 1639. On 1 June, still on shipboard, they signed a covenant to "sit down and join ourselves together in one entire plantation." Robert Kitchel's name stands first. The ship reached New Haven early in July, after seven weeks at sea, with not one passenger dead. It was the first ship ever to anchor there.

The company bought the land called Menunkatuck from its Sachem Squaw, and it became Guilford. The deed of 29 September 1639 was drawn in the names of six planters, Robert Kitchel among them. The planters also put "the civil power for the administration of justice and the preservation of peace" into the hands of four men until a church could be gathered: Robert Kitchel, William Chittenden, John Bishop and William Leete. He was one of the three men chosen each year to collect the minister's maintenance and manage the church's temporal affairs.

He sat for Guilford in the General Court of the New Haven Colony as a deputy in 1647, from 1650 to 1654, and from 1655 to 1660. With William Chittenden he acted as attorney for Mr. Sheaffe in a suit over hogs that got into a neighbor's corn. When New Haven Colony was joined to Connecticut in 1665, the Connecticut court named him and George Hubbard commissioners for Guilford, with magistrate's power. He left Guilford at the time of the union.

In 1666 he went with the New Haven Colony men who founded Newark, New Jersey. His son-in-law, the Rev. Jeremiah Peck, went too. His son Samuel settled at Newark, became a man of standing there, and died in 1690. Robert Kitchell died at Newark about 1672. His widow Margaret lived out her life with their daughter Johanna in the Peck household, and died at Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1682.

If Robert Kitchell is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Robert Kitchell (1601-1672)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/robert-kitchell-1601-1672-82bcd5.