Ancestors

Roger Conant

Roger Conant was baptized at All Saints Church, East Budleigh, Devon, on 9 April 1592. He was the youngest of the eight children of Richard Conant and Agnes Clarke. His father was a churchwarden of East Budleigh, as his grandfather had been. His mother was the daughter of John Clarke, the leading merchant of Colyton, eight miles to the east.

He went to London as a young man, probably with his brother Christopher, who was apprenticed to the Grocers' Company in 1609. On 20 January 1620 the two brothers, "Christopher Conant, grocer, and Roger Conant, salter, both of the parish of St. Lawrence, Jewry," signed the bond for their brother John's first fruits as rector of Lymington. A salter dealt in salt and in the dry goods that salt preserved. On 11 November 1618 Roger married Sarah Horton at St Ann's, Blackfriars. Their daughter Sarah was christened at St Lawrence Jewry in September 1619 and buried there in October 1620. A son, Caleb, was christened there on 27 May 1622.

In 1623 he crossed to New England, probably on the Anne, which reached Plymouth in July with his brother Christopher aboard. In 1671 he called himself "a planter in New England forty eight yeers and upward." He did not stay long at Plymouth. The Pilgrims were Separatists who had broken with the Church of England. He was a Puritan who meant to reform it from within. He moved to Nantasket, now Hull, with others who disliked the Plymouth way. An island in Boston harbor, later Governor's Island, was known for some years as Conant's Island.

In the winter of 1624-25 the Rev. John White of Dorchester and his Dorchester Company, whose fishing station at Cape Ann was failing, chose him to run it. William Hubbard wrote that they "would commit unto him all their affairs as well fishing as planting." He took charge late in 1625 on the west side of what is now Gloucester harbor. About two hundred men were working there. While he was there, Captain Miles Standish of Plymouth came to take back a fishing stage seized by a Captain Hewes. Conant and Captain Peirce, whose ship lay nearby, talked both sides down, and the ship's crew built Plymouth a new stage.

The Cape Ann station lost money, and the company gave it up. Conant disliked the place anyway. He had found a better one across the bay at Naumkeag. In the fall of 1626 he moved there with about forty of the settlers. He built the first house at Salem. John White wrote to urge him not to give up, and promised a patent and supplies if Conant and three others, John Woodbury, John Balch and Peter Palfrey, would stay.

Soon afterward most of the settlers decided to leave with their minister, John Lyford, for Virginia. Woodbury, Balch and Palfrey meant to go too. Conant refused, and his refusal held them all except Lyford. In 1628 a new company holding the Massachusetts Bay patent sent John Endicott to replace him. The old planters were angry at being made tenants of newcomers. Hubbard wrote that the quarrel was "by the prudent moderation of Mr. Conant ... quietly composed." Conant's descendants, and the historian John Wingate Thornton, later argued that he was the first governor of Massachusetts.

Salem granted him and four other old planters two hundred acres each in 1636, on the Bass River side, which became Beverly. His name heads the list of members when the Beverly church was gathered in 1667. In 1671 he asked the General Court to rename Beverly after his birthplace, and was refused. In 1674 he was listed among the householders of Marblehead.

He made his will on 1 March 1678, "aged about eightie fiue yeares, being of perfect vnderstanding, though weak & feeble in body." He left his son Exercise land near Dunstable and at Beverly, his gray horse and his cattle, and made him executor. His wife Sarah, last named in a deed of 1666, is not in the will. Roger Conant died on 19 November 1679, in his eighty-eighth year. Where he was buried is not known.

Seven of his children lived to grow up: Lot, born about 1624 at Nantasket or Cape Ann; Roger, born in 1626, "the first white child born in Salem"; Sarah, born about 1628; Joshua; Mary; Elizabeth; and Exercise, baptized at Salem in 1637. Caleb went back to England and died there unmarried before 1633.

If Roger Conant is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Roger Conant (1592-1679)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/roger-conant-1592-1679-1082c8.