A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony by John Demos

Author:John Demos [Demos, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1999-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

WIDER KIN CONNECTIONS

The evidence that Plymouth households were basically nuclear in structure has been presented in an earlier chapter. It remains to add here a caution against making too much of this fact. We should not imagine that each family unit lived in isolation from all the others, including those to which it was related by blood. On the contrary, the sources from the period show a considerable degree of interconnection among kin.

There is, initially, the matter of physical contiguity—the possibility that neighbors, in the Old Colony towns, were often related as parents and children, or siblings, or cousins. This possibility would seem to pivot on certain questions of inheritance. One can imagine, for example, that a father might decide to break up his own estate in order to establish his children on adjoining subsections of it. Did this happen at Plymouth, and if so, how often? A final answer to such questions can only come from a comprehensive effort to map all the landholdings of all the settlers. Nothing on this scale has ever been attempted; so, for the present, tentative conclusions are all we can manage. It does seem clear, however, from the analysis of many individual deeds, that close relatives occasionally lived next to one another—but not really often.

The will of John Washburn of Bridgewater, who died in 1688, is revealing in this connection.1 Most of Washburn’s sons were by this time fully adult and had begun to farm lands of their own. It is obvious, however, from certain clauses in the will that the father had simply detached these lands from his own original holdings and given them to his sons as portions. Their proximity to one another is implicit in the description of their various boundaries. Thus at the time of his death John Washburn was living on land that was bordered on three sides by farms belonging to his sons. And the same pattern can be inferred for a number of other families as well.2

However, the opportunity to establish one’s sons nearby was apparently a function of wealth. Washburn was among the most affluent residents of Bridgewater, and the same can be said of most similar cases. But the situation that prevailed in more “average” families was very nearly the reverse. The original holdings of most men simply were not large enough to accommodate the needs of grown children as well. At the same time many people did manage to acquire additional lands in some new township, or even in a frontier area, which made suitable portions for their young. George Soule, for example, left his main holdings in Duxbury to his eldest son John. But his will also mentions some earlier bequests of land—to two other sons in Dartmouth, and to two daughters in Middleborough.3 Benjamin Bartlett left his home at Duxbury to one of his sons—and willed to three others various properties in Middleborough, Little Compton, and Rochester.4 Here, then, inheritance worked in the direction of scattering the younger generation, rather than holding it close to the parental hearth.

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