Individual Details

GEORGE PARKHURST

(May 1589 - 18 Jun 1675)

Said to have resided in Ipswich, County Suffolk, England, and came to New England about 1635. He was in Watertown, MA in 1642 but by Oct of 1645 had moved to Boston. He sold his Watertown property between 1645 and 1655 and one grantee was son-in-law Thomas Arnold. Other children were George, Benjamin, Joseph, Deborah, Elizabeth, Mary.
"Beekman Patent" book lists his spouse as Susanna with no other information. Ancestral file gives Phebe with date of marriage, etc. with Phebe's date of death in 1645; George may very well have taken a 2nd wife.

Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 13:55:25 -0700
From: Jack Heine
PARKHURST-L@rootsweb.com
GEORGE2 PARKHURST (JOHN1)1 was born May 1589 in Ipswich, Suffork, England, and died Abt. 1675 in Watertown, Mass.. He married (1) PHEBE LEETE Abt. 1611 in Ipswich, England, daughter of ROBERT LEETE and ALICE GRUNDY. She was born Abt. 1585 in Ipswich, Suffork, England, and died 24 April 1645 in England. He married (2) SUSANNA SIMPSON Abt. 1644.

Notes for GEORGE PARKHURST:
First appears in American Records 10 May 1642, when it was ordered that a highway should be laid out by his house. He made a petition in 1655 that he and his second wife were in destitute condition,. When he left England he brought at least two children with him (George Jr., and Phebe) and is known to be living in Watertown Mass, in 1642. He was probably a man of considerable means for he owned a large tract of land, besides a homestead of twelve acres. In 1643 he was admitted freeman. He married his second wife, Susanna, widow of John Simpson, in 1645. The same year he sold his Watertown estate and moved to Boston.

Children of GEORGE PARKHURST and PHEBE LEETE are:
3. i. PHEBE3 PARKHURST, b. 29 November 1612; d. Aft. 1688.
ii. MARY PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1614.
iii. SAMUEL PARKHURST, b. Abt. February 1616/17.
iv. DEBORAH PARKHURST, b. 1 August 1619.
v. GEORGE JR PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1621.
vi. JOHN PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1623.
vii. ABIGAIL PARKHURST, b. Abt. January 1625/26.
viii. ELIZABETH PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1628.
ix. JOSEPH PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1629.

Children of GEORGE PARKHURST and SUSANNA SIMPSON are:
x. BENJAMIN3 PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1645.
xi. SON PARKHURST.
xii. DANIEL PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1649.
xiii. JOSHUA PARKHURST, b. Abt. 1651.
xiv. CALEB PARKHURST, b. Abt. February 1653/54.

Sources:
1. Bond's Hist. Watertown Mass, page 9.
2. Genealogy Dictionary of RI.

George Parkhurst Increasings for Nine Generations in Two Volumes, Vol I
by Peter G. Parkhurst, Los Altos Hills, CA, 1995
George was born circa 1588 in Ipswich, Suffolk Enland to John & Sarah Parkhurst. He was buried 18 Jun 1675 in Ipswich.
George married Phebe Leete and their nine children were baptized at Ipswich. [The author does not give these baptisms.]
George's arrival date in New Enland can be estimated by the marriages contracted by his children in Massachusetts prior to 1640. His first record is at Watertown in 1642 when a highway was to be laid out to his house. He is not in the lists of the four grants of land in Watertown between 25 Jul 1636 [yes he was, see later] and 9 Apr 1638. About 1644, he married his second wife, Susanna Simson, widow of John Simson - who was buried at Watertown on 10 Jun 1643, leaving 2 sons, 3 daughters.
Susanna sold some of her husband's land on 9 Nov 1643. George Parkhurst sold two acres of Simson's land on 16 Nov 1644. So they married sometime during that year.
4 Oct 1645, George sold six acres in Watertown but was living in Boston.
13 Jun 1655, George Parkhurst sold the last 12 acres of what had been John Simson's land. The sale was made by permission of the court on 23 May 1655, in response to a petition that he was "near 67 years old" and he and his wife, who was in England, and most of their children were destitute. She had had 10 children during her 20 years of residence in American [included 5 Parkhurst sons] and she had gone to London with six of her children, but found her mother, brother & sisters were unable to do what she expected. Four of her children had remained in America, and George disired to sell the land so he could go to the aid of wife. that is his last record in America; presumably he did return to England. He was probably the "old George Parkhurst" buried 18 Jun 1675 at St. Lawrence, Ipswich. He may have been living with his cousin Nathaniel Parkhurst of that place.

Watertown Records:
1636
First Inventory of Grants and Possessions:
Original Index:
p.81. George Parkhurst
p.82 Thomas Arnold
George Parkhust
1. An Homestall of 12a bounded E with the highway, W with William Jennison, N with Michael Barstow & the S with George Munnings
2. A Farme of 56a of upland in the 1 Division
3. An Homestall of 16a more or les bounded W with Hugh Mason, E with John Hayward, N with Richard Beers, & S with Justinian Holden
4. 4a of Plowland in the hither Plaine & the 6 Lott
5. 4a of Meddow in the remote Meddowes & the 100 Lott
6. 30a of upland being a great Divident in the 1 Division & the 13 lott
7. 9a of upland beyond the further Plaine & the 16 lott
8. 2a of Meddow bounded E with William Hammond, W with Isaac Sterne, N with Henry Bright & S with John Warrin
9. A Farme of 78 acres of upland in the 5 division

Another inventory of grants taken 9th day 7th month 1639, did not include George Parkhurst.

Vita Brevis, "Never a dull moment", by Alician Crane Williams, 24 March 2022
Working on the Early New England Families sketch for George Parkhurst of Watertown, I find myself deep in the middle of three marriages, a total of fourteen children, financial destitution, and return to England. If you are a descendant of George Parkhurst, you may not know that he returned to England, because all his surviving children who left descendants were from his first marriage. By his second marriage, which produced five more children, he has no descendants known to us.[1]
The story begins by 1634 when John Simson and his wife Susan/Susanna/Susannah, maiden name unknown, settled in Watertown, where they spent the next decade producing a family of five children.[2] Next, sometime before May 1642, George Parkhurst arrived in Watertown. He and his first wife, Phebe (Leete) Parkhurst, had nine children baptized in Ipswich, Suffolk, between 1612 and 1629, three of whom did not survive childhood. We know that George was in Watertown in May 1642 because the town ordered a road be built past his house. There are no earlier records for George in New England, but if a man had a house all built by May 1642, he very likely arrived in New England the previous summer. It is not known whether wife Phebe came with him, but that seems unlikely as there is no death record for her here, and by 1643/44 George had remarried.
In 1641 George and Phebe’s children ranged in age from 12 to 29. We know that his three eldest daughters married New England men: Phebe to Thomas Arnold of Providence, Mary to Rev. Thomas Carter of Woburn, and Deborah to John Smith of Watertown and Nantucket. The last girl, Elizabeth, married later, in about 1645. It has traditionally been assumed that George came to New England with all his living children. But there is a Catch.
We are hampered by the fact that we do not have marriage dates for any of the girls, but we can calculate their marriages by the dates of birth of their first (known) children. In other words, Phebe married Thomas Arnold before March 1640/41, Mary was married to Thomas Carter before August 1640, and Deborah also had her first child in 1640. Subtracting nine months means that the girls were likely married in 1639 and 1640. Thomas Arnold and Rev. Thomas Carter had been in New England since 1637. So how could George Parkhurst have been in New England by 1639, yet left absolutely no records until 1642? If he wasn’t here earlier, then how did his daughters get to New England before him?
The answer appears to lie with their Aunt Ruth (Leete) Dalton, who married Rev. Timothy Dalton, and settled in Hampton, New Hampshire. Ruth was Phebe (Leete) Parkhurst’s sister. She had given birth to four children; only the youngest, Timothy, survived to come to New England. It is not difficult to infer that Ruth, faced with a voyage to the New World without other family support, might have arranged for her three grown nieces to accompany her. In 1637 Phebe was 25 and widowed, Mary was 24, and Deborah, 18. Their arrival in New England in 1637 gave them plenty of time to meet and marry their New England husbands. If George arrived about 1641, he would have only brought the younger children with him: George, Jr., 20, Elizabeth, 13, and Joseph, 12.
John Simson died in 1643 leaving widow Susan in debt with five children under the age of seven. George married the widow and took his second family from Watertown to Boston, where they added five more children to the household. Both Susan and George sold almost all their property to settle debts and to support ten children. In 1654, shortly after giving birth to her tenth child in February, Susan split the family and took six of her ten children with her to England. Four boys were left with George. The plan was to convince her family to rescue the others, but the rescue did not materialize, and Susan had to write back to George with directions to sell the last property in Watertown and come to her.
Well, fine, except Susan had inherited that property from her first husband, and George could not legally sell it without her signature. In May 1655 George read his wife’s letter to the Massachusetts Court, pleading the necessity of his selling her property. His deposition to the Court is a wonderful archive of George and Susan’s life, and the transcript will be in the Parkhurst sketch. The Court gave permission, with the caveat that some of the money from the sale be left in trust for the two Simson boys, John and Jonathan, who had been apprenticed and had to stay to serve out their terms. Probably within a month or two George set sail for England. He had two boys of his own who might have sailed back with him, but finances most likely would have prohibited that. At least one boy, Benjamin, his eldest by Susan, probably remained in New England.
Sigh, never a dull moment.
Notes
[1] Claims that his son Benjamin Parkhurst went to New Jersey cannot be supported. This will be discussed in the Early New England Families sketch for George Parkhurst.
[2] Robert Charles Anderson, George F. Sanborn, Jr., and Melinde Lutz Sanborn, The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, 7 vols. (Boston: 1999-2009), 6: 341-45.

Events

Birth	May 1589	Key Parrish, Ipswich, Suffolk, England
Marriage	29 Mar 1610	Saint Mary on Quay, Ipswich, Suffolk, England - PHEBE LEETE
Marriage	Ca 1646	Susanna Simpson
Death	18 Jun 1675	Ipswich, Suffolk, England

Families

Spouse	PHEBE LEETE ( - 1642)
Child	PHEBE PARKHURST ( - 1688)
Child	Mary Parkhurst ( - )
Child	Samuel Parkhurst ( - )
Child	Deborah Parkhurst ( - )
Child	George Parkhurst ( - 1699)
Child	John Parkhurst ( - )
Child	Abigail Parkhurst ( - )
Child	Elizabeth Parkhurst ( - 1727)
Child	Joseph Parkhurst ( - )

Spouse	Susanna Simpson (1610 - 1691)
Child	Benjamin Parkhurst (1647 - )
Child	Daniel Parkhurst (1649 - 1649)
Child	Joshua Parkhurst (1652 - )
Child	Caleb Parkhurst (1653 - )

Father	JOHN PARKHURST (1554 - 1611)
Mother	SARAH [Parkhurst] ( - )

Webtags

George Parkhurst in Early New England Families Study Project

NEHG Register, "Family of George Parkhurst"