Jabez Gorham, #9500

 This morning I added the 9,500th name to the family tree. He was Jabez Gorham (1656-1725). Jabez was born on Cape Cod, died at Bristol, Rhode Island. He was the son of John Gorham and Desire Howland, and the grandson of John Howland of Mayflower fame.

I had to add Jabez into the family tree in order to get William Blaxton in there, which was my real goal. Jabez and his wife (Hannah Sturgis) had a daughter, Katherine. Katherine married John Blaxton, the son of William. William was an interesting fellow. He was a graduate of Emmanuel College at Oxford, and  priest in the Church of England (thus, not a Puritan or a separatist).

He arrived in New England in 1623, on board the Katherine. He was a chaplain with the failed expedition to establish Weymouth, and after most of those settlers returned to England he traveled a few miles north to build a cabin on a rocky peninsula surrounded by swampland, later to be known as Boston. He lived there alone on land that would someday be known as the Boston Common.

A little later, in 1629 to be precise, a new group of settlers arrived in the area, led by John Winthrop, establishing the first colony at Boston. Blaxton eventually sold his land to the new settlers, who were Puritans. Blaxton probably had serious religious differences with these Puritans, and wanted to live as far from them as he could, so he moved to a place some 35 miles to the south, in what is now Cumberland, Rhode Island (then a part of the Plymouth Colony), where once again he was the first European settler. This was in 1635, a year before the first European colony in Rhode Island, led by Roger Williams.

Blaxton finally married at the age of 64 (in 1659). His wife, Sarah Fisher, was 30 years younger than him and a widow. Their son, John, who as mentioned above would marry Katherine Gorham, was born in 1660.

Blaxton, who apparently enjoyed good relations through the years with the natives living around him, eventually lost his home and his extensive library when it was a burned to the ground during King Philip's War.

Oh, and Blaxton has one other claim to fame, and this one perhaps the most important. While living on the land that would eventually become Boston the Rev. Blaxton planted an apple orchard. This was quite possibly the first apple orchard on American soil. The Roxbury Russet, the earliest known American apple, is thought to have come from Blaxton's orchard (the Rhode Island Greening and the Yellow Sweeting are 2 other varieties associated with Blaxton's plantings). Read more about Blaxton's apples here and here.

* * * 

So how does William Blaxton fit into my tree? My family tree is a joint tree featuring the ancestors of both myself and my wife, Laurie. Blaxton's relation to Laurie is somewhat closer than to me (keep in mind that since Laurie and I are distant cousins, everyone in the tree is related to both of us). Katherine Gorham, who married John Blaxton (son of William) was Laurie's 9th Great Aunt, and thus the daughter-in-law of William Blaxton).


(Image by Robert Linsdell from St. Andrews, Canada - Boston Common, Massachusetts (493497), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46943494)


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