New Beginnings in New England

Having taken a year out from this blog, I'm making a fresh start as part of the Guild of One-Name Studies 2021 challenge - to write at least one item a month on a given topic - and appropriately enough for me, the topic for March is "New Beginnings". 

A fresh start

There are many families in my CLOSE/CLOSS one-name study who chose to emigrate and make a fresh start in life in many miles from their original home.  The family I'm focusing on here is that of John CLOSE, who is believed to have emigrated from Swaledale, North Yorkshire, along with his wife Elizabeth and four children, to Greenwich in what would later become the county of Fairfield, Connecticut, USA.  The children were born in Yorkshire between about 1630 and 1637, and since, according to the  History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield (ed. Donald Lines Jacobus), "Goodman John CLOSE" was mentioned in the will of another early Fairfield settler, William Frost, in 1645, the implication is that the family emigrated some time around 1640.  This would have placed the family in what is today known as Old Greenwich in or shortly after the year when the town of Greenwich was founded.

Old Greenwich: Location in Fairfield County and the state of Connecticut.
Source: RCSPrinter123 on Wikipedia

Goodman

The designation 'Goodman' in 17th Century England as well as in Puritan New England was used as a title, roughly equivalent to 'Mr.' for men regarded as middle class - that is, not having a noble title, and not qualifying to be called a 'gentleman'.  John is most likely to have been a yeoman farmer, as many of his descendants were.

I am most grateful to Karen Goodman (appropriate surname!) who some years ago kindly sent me an extensive tree of this family's descendants.  Since I'm studying the CLOSE surname, I have only followed up family members with that surname, plus their spouses, but have excluded the descendants of married female CLOSEs.  Nevertheless, my Goodman John CLOSE tree currently contains over 2,000 individuals descended from John's son Thomas (abt 1637-1709).

Descendants

Thomas married Sarah HARDY (1650-1725) in 1669. The couple were blessed with 10 children, all of whom survived into adulthood. Shortly before Thomas died he wrote a will dated 20 Dec 1708 in which he mentioned his wife, all his living adult children and the three young children, aged 2, 3 and 5, of his son Thomas who had recently died, to each of whom he left five shillings - equivalent to about 2 days' wages for a skilled worker in those days.

Understandably, my researches into Goodman John CLOSE's descendants have led me to many and varied places in the United States.  However, according to the 1940 USA Census, thirty-four people bearing the CLOSE surname living in Fairfield county have been identified as his direct descendants, mostly in Greenwich and Stamford.   A further twenty-two descendants named CLOSE were living in the nearby Connecticut counties of New Haven, New London and Hartford in 1940.


Reeth, Swaledale, North Yorkshire


Origins

How can we prove that the family came from Swaledale?  Unfortunately the available Grinton parish registers begin in 1640 - just too late to check for John & Elizabeth's marriage and their children's baptisms.  However, in the FamilyTreeDNA CLOSE Y-DNA project, several UK participants with known Grinton, Swaledale ancestry have been found to match with several others in the USA descended from the Fairfield CT CLOSEs. These DNA results point to the conclusion that the extensive family of Goodman John CLOSE in the USA can indeed trace its ancestry to the Swaledale CLOSEs. Whether the common ancestor can ever be identified is a problem still to be resolved.

To be continued

Coming soon: an account of Goodman John CLOSE's great-great grandsons who also made a new beginning - not of choice, but out of necessity in their case ...



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