Thomas Fuller

1618-1698 · England

Born 1618, England

Died 1698

Children include Jacob

Thomas Fuller came to New England in 1638. He died in June 1698 aged eighty years and two months, so he was born about April 1618. A family tradition says he came only to look the country over and meant to go home after a year. It gives two reasons why he stayed. One is that he was converted under the preaching of the Rev. Thomas Shepard of Cambridge. The other is that he fell for a young woman who would not go to England with him. In this version he went back alone, collected his inheritance from his father, a blacksmith, and returned.

He settled in the part of Charlestown that became Woburn and signed the Town Orders of Woburn, drawn up at Charlestown in December 1640. He was a blacksmith himself. Woburn granted him meadow land in 1648, and "4 poles square of swamp next to his shop." On 13 June 1643 he married Elizabeth Tidd at Woburn. They had nine children there between 1644 and 1662. He was a sergeant of the train band by 1656, a selectman in 1663 and 1664, and later a lieutenant.

After Elizabeth died he moved north. About 1665 he got about three hundred acres near Will's Hill in the north part of Salem, from Major General Daniel Denison of Ipswich. The district became the town of Middleton in 1728. He built his house half a mile east of Will's Hill, on a stream then called Pierce's Brook, and kept a blacksmith's shop there. He was the second settler in that part of the woods. A family history notes that his house stood not far from the place where the Salem witchcraft accusations began in 1692.

In 1684 he went back to Woburn for about three years. He was a selectman there again in 1685. He married a second wife there in August 1684, Sarah, the widow of Lieutenant John Wyman. She died in May 1688. He then returned to his farm and married a third time, to Hannah Wilson, a widow, who outlived him.

He made his will on 9 June 1698, "being Sick & weak in body." Most of his land had already gone to his children. The will gave the home farm, his tools and the saw mill irons to his son Jacob, who had stayed on the farm, and made Jacob his sole executor. He died that month, and the will was proved on 4 July 1698.

Children

Jacob Fuller 1655-1731

Sources

Historical Collections of the Essex Institute, vol. 2 no. 2 (April 1860), Salem town records of births, archive.org sim_peabody-essex-museum-collections_1860-04_2_2.

William Hyslop Fuller, Fuller Genealogy, vol. 4 (1908), archive.org fullergenealogy04full, p. 9.

A Brief Sketch of Thomas Fuller and One Line of His Descendants (1909), archive.org briefsketchoftho00lcfull, p. 51.

William Hyslop Fuller, Fuller Genealogy, vol. 4 (1908), archive.org fullergenealogy04full, pp. 9-11. A Brief Sketch of Thomas Fuller and One Line of His Descendants (1909), archive.org briefsketchoftho00lcfull, pp. 3-4, 13, 50-51. Woburn Records of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, archive.org woburnrecordsofb01john, marriages.

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Cite: Heirology, "Thomas Fuller (1618-1698)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/thomas-fuller-1618-1698-0f35f0.