John Brown

The following information is taken from his wife's profile which can be found at:

Mary Brown

Information on her husband: JOHN BROWN'S FATHER WAS FRANCIS 1610,HIS FATHER FRANCIS 1584 HIS FATHER THOMAS 1546

Mary Burwell bpt. Minden Chapel 20 Sept 1625 married John Browne, died Newark, NJ on 6 Nov 1690 Families of Early Milford, Connecticut page 163

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http://www.axtell-surname.org.uk/fam21800.html

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Very little is known about the ancestry of John Brown(e) who married Mary Burwell. I have pursued numerous leads without success, and will comment here only on the most common lead, which has infiltrated posted genealogies like some virus: namely that John Brown's father was Francis Brown of New Haven. Francis Brown was born about 1610 and had a son, John, about 1640. John Brown was born about 1620, when Francis was ten years old. He had a son, John Brown, Jr, who was probably born about 1645. (John Jr. received land in his own right when the Browns moved from Milford, CT to Newark, NJ in 1666, and to get that land, he had to be at least 20 years old. The children of the two John Browns are all different, as shown in the biography of Francis Brown in Donald Lines Jacobus' Families of Ancient New Haven.

John Brown of Newark was about 70 when he died in 1690, and (Mary Burwell) Brown who died about 1669, would have been about 66. The Milford settlers in large part came from Hertfordshire in England, a county northeast of London between Buckinghamshire and Cambridge. They were followers of Peter Prudden, an ordained Anglican priest with a Cambridge degree. Prudden was puritan, wanting a simpler church without the elaborate ceremonies, vestments, and other formalities of what today we would call the "high Anglican" church, which was much in favor during the reign of Charles I. Charles' appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, loved the "high" ceremonies and was very aggressive in dismissing the "low church" priests and harassing them. Prudden may have been excluded from good positions, but he preached widely in the Hitchin area of Hertfordshire, and had a church in a nearby town. When a group of Separatists (those who had left the Anglican Church in favor of more Calvinistic teachings) under John Davenport. asked him and those of his flock to come with them to New England. Prudden agreed, but he and his followers always intended to have a separate town and church. When they did settle in New Haven, soon to be a colony, they moved about 19 miles to the east to form Milford. The ships left in 1637, arriving in Roxbury, now part of Boston, in that year, and moved down to New Haven shortly thereafter. So many of the settlers of Newark, had roots in Hertfordshire.

Hertfordshire records have the baptisms of two John Browns around 1620, one born at Ware in 1619, and one born in HItchin in 1620. Ware is in the south of Hertfordshire and much closer to London than Hitchin is. The Hitchin birth, however, links him very closely to the Burwells: Mary Burwell was baptized in HItchin also. I have no direct proof that the HItchin John Brown is John Brown of Newark, but the existing evidence certainly suggests he is.

We also have no evidence of when John Brown came to New England. No ship's register names him, and he owned no land until 1648, when he was granted 2 acres at Milford. And in 1649, he and Mary joined Peter Prudden's Congregational Church at Milford. In a manuscript in the NJ Genealogical Society is a draft of an article by Donald Lines Jacobus and N.G. Parcels on the Connecticut backgrounds on the Newark settlers. It looks like it was slated to be published, but if published I have not seen it, so this may not be the last word Jacobus and Parcels had on the subject, and it is less authoritative than a published piece, nonetheless, I think it is sound. According to Jacobus and Parcels “Mary, baptized at Minsden Chapel, Hitchin, Hertfordhsire, England, September 26, 1623, was the daughter of John and Esther (Winchester) Burwell, original Milford settlers. Neither John Brown nor Mary were members initially of the church at Milford. John joined December 9, 1649, and Mary two weeks later. They baptized three children on December 16 of that year.” (The Milford church would not baptize children unless one of their parents were admitted to the congregation, so they could not have baptized the children before the church accepted them.) [Jacobus, Donald Lines and N.G. Parcel in Charles Gardner's typescript of an unfinished biographical dictionary. It is in the Alexander Library in the genealogical collection at Rutgers, New Brnnswick, NJ.

Assuming John Browne is the Hitchin John Brown, when did he come to New England? To have three children by 1649 he must have been there before 1645 or 6. Did he come as a young man after his childhood sweetheart, daring the ocean voyage and trials of a new land, making a great romantic story. Or, did he come with the Burwells in 1637? John Burwell had lost his first wife, Elizabeth Winchester, and remarried Alice Heath, and his sons through that union were all young at the time. Perhaps he persuaded John Brown (and his parents) to accompany the Burwell family and had been in New England since 1637. There is no way to tell, but it is a plausible scenario.

A few things are troubling about John Brown of Hitchin being John Brown of Newark. (1) John of Hitchin's father and a brother were named Barnard, and subsequent generations have no child named Barnard or Bernard. (2) There was a very Puritan minister a Joseph Brown with some major positions in London during the Cromwell's, rule and I think he may have had a brother, John, but they father isn't the one I would expect, so I could be wrong about Hitchin.

The Milford settlers came with the "Davenport" group, followers of Thomas Davenport and Theophilus Eaton. The Milford settlers, however, were followers of a somewhat more moderate preacher, Peter Prudden, and had planned, with Davenport's knowledge, to settle separately. The party came in two ships and settled initially in Roxbury, now a part of Boston, for about a year until land could be found. A year or so after settling in New Haven, the Milford group did indeed move about ten miles eastward along Long Island Sound to found the town of Milford. Peter Prudden's base in England was in Hertfordshire, England, almost midway between Cambridge and Oxford, and he preached in many of the local churches. with his promotion of what today we would call "low church" Episcopalianism (Anglicanism).

Recent postings of many early genealogical records in Britain, include records for churches in Peter Prudden's Hertfordshire. It had long been known that Mary Burwell was born in Minsden Chapel, Hitchin, Herfordshire in 1623. "Minsden" is taken from the pronunciation of the little town of Missenden, a part of HItchin, and apparently there was a chapel there. Those records are not available yet on line, but the indexes have been on line for some time. The records of the bigger church in HItchin itself, St. Marys, are on line. While perusing them. I found a John Browne, son of Barnard Browne baptized in 1620, (The marriage of Barnard to Elizabeth Waters was in HItchin in 1610.) This is highly probable John Brown of Milford and Newark.and I treat him as such in this genealogy. If someone should e-mail me saying, "No, no, the will of Peter Brown of Somerset who died in 1647 leaves money to his son, John, of Milford, New Haven Colony," and proves it, then I will be surprised, but I think it unlikely.

Milford and New Haven lay well east of the Connecticut River, and the Dutch claimed all the area between the Delaware River and the Connecticut River as New Netherlands, but they had neither the population or the military to enforce the claim. Until 1664, when the British defeated the Dutch in the first Anglo-Dutch War, New Haven (and Milford) was a separate colony, and the Colony of Connecticut did not exist. With the possibility of an attack on the small village from either Indians or Dutch, Milford built a palisade around the town. Inside, each family held 2 acres of land. As the population expanded, however, families were granted their two-acre plots outside the palisades, which is where John and Mary and their growing family settled. They must have had lands elsewhere because two acres is insufficient to support a farming family, but I have seen no evidence of other lands. (In Newark, the Browns had a small plot in town, but additional lands outside the town itself.)

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GEDCOM Source

@R351077827@ Ancestry Family Trees Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members. Ancestry Family Tree http://trees.ancestry.com/pt/AMTCitationRedir.aspx?tid=56830191&pid...