Individual Details
Roger Connant
(9 Apr 1592 - )
wiki trees
Roger Conant (1592 - 1679)
Roger
Conant
Born 9 Apr 1592
in East Budleigh, Devon, England
ANCESTORS Son of Richard Conant and Agnes (Clarke) ConantBrother of Joan (Conant) Richards, Richard Conant Jr., Robert Conant, Jane (Conant) Wotton, John Conant, Thomas Conant and Christopher ConantHusband of Sarah (Horton) Conant
— married 11 Nov 1618 in St Ann Blackfriars, City of London, EnglandDESCENDANTS Father of Sarah Conant, Caleb Conant, Lot Conant, Roger Conant, Sarah (Conant) Leach, Joshua Conant, Mary (Conant) Dodge, Elizabeth Conant and Exercise ConantDied 19 Nov 1679
in Massachusetts Bay Colony (present day Essex County, Massachusetts, USA)
Profile managers: Jillaine Smith [send private message], Puritan Great Migration Project WikiTree [send private message], Rick Parrott [send private message], John Ellis [send private message], Bill Smith [send private message], and Audrey Neva [send private message]Profile last modified 18 Jun 2021 | Created 11 Mar 2011This page has been accessed 15,075 times.
Roger Conant migrated to New England during the Puritan Great Migration (1620-1640).
Join: Puritan Great Migration Project
Discuss: PGM
Contents
[hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Origins
1.2 Plymouth
1.3 Salem
1.4 Legacy
2 For Further Reading
3 Sources
Biography
The most significant fact about Roger Conant as a leader in the New England colonies is what he was not: he was not a Puritan with divine intent to establish a theocratic commonwealth in the colonies; he was not a wealthy, well-connected investor intent on exploiting the labor of the colonists. In documents at New England, he styled himself “yeoman” .[1] He was a salter, which is to say a working businessman intent on making a living for himself and his family, and he became a leader because people needed leadership under difficult circumstances.
Origins
Roger was baptized on 9 April 1592, the son of Richard Conant and Agnes Clarke of East Budleigh, Devonshire. This was a family of education and religion; one of their sons and two grandsons became ordained ministers of some prominence.[2] Roger’s education equipped him to keep records and accounts as well as survey land – skills that he would put to good use in his life in the colonies. As a young man, he moved to London, where he became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Salters, [3]by January 1620.[1] On 11 November 1618, he married Sarah Horton at St Ann Blackfriars, City of London. [4]By that date, he would have finished his apprenticeship with the guild.
Plymouth
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fisheries off the coast of New England were of great importance for the English economy. It was necessary to salt the fish for preservation in transport, which drew Roger Conant to the region only a few years after the first successful permanent settlement: the Pilgrim Plymouth colony. It appears that Roger was sent by Robert Cushman[5] of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in aid of promoting the fishery trade at the colony, possibly traveling in the Charity with the Reverend John Lyford, also sent by the Adventurers to be a minister of religion there. If so, this would go a way to explaining the course of subsequent events at Plymouth.
Conant, while a puritan and a godly man, was not a Pilgrim, was a stranger and newcomer to the colony on his arrival in 1624, as was Lyford. William Bradford, Plymouth’s elected Governor, accused Lyford of promoting religious practices of the established English church among the settlers – practices that the Pilgrims had come to America to escape. After Lyford and a fellow dissident, John Oldham, were expelled from the colony, Roger Conant withdrew as well.
There are two strongly contradictory accounts of Roger Conant in Plymouth. Bradford wrote: “. . . he whom they sent to make salt was an ignorant, foolish, selfwilled fellow.”[6] William Hubbard, on the other hand, called him “a religious, sober and prudent gentleman.”[7] Bradford’s account is so full of malice, spite, and self-serving – and intercepting Lyford’s private correspondence - it is hard to credit, but Hubbard’s version is no less partisan.
Roger Conant was probably not in Plymouth for more than six months, not long enough to receive a grant of land, as his brother Christopher had when arriving the year before on the Anne. (The minimum amount: one acre.) He removed in 1624 to a location called Nantasket by the native Americans, then to Cape Ann, where the Plymouth colony had earlier attempted to set up a fishery.[1]
In 1623, a group of investors led by Reverend John White, called the Dorchester Company,[8] had brought a small number of colonists to Cape Ann to a settlement they named Gloucester, and in 1625 they invited Roger Conant to move there as governor of the place. Conflict soon ensued, as Captain Miles Standish came from Plymouth with an armed group, claiming encroachment. Hubbard praised Conant for making peace, with harsh words for Standish.[7] Bradford blamed Conant for the outpost’s failure, alleging that he incompetently set the place on fire.[6]
The Dorchester group withdrew its funding by the end of the year, and the colony broke up, with Roger Conant leading a small band west to settle a more promising situation in Naumkeag, soon to be renamed Salem.[7]
Salem
Reverend John White made another attempt at settlement, receiving a patent from the Council for New England that allowed him the rights to Naumkeag. The new governor, John Endicott, replaced Roger Conant in that office and renamed the town. The next year, Endicott and his company acquired a royal charter, becoming a corporation under the name the "Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England.” This time, Conant remained. He received substantial land grants, built the first house in Salem, and was admitted as a freeman of the town in 1631. This, in Salem, meant that he had previously been accepted as a member of the Salem church.[1]
For the next twenty-five years, Roger Conant filled a variety of civic offices, serving as a Deputy to the Court, a magistrate, a member of juries. He was regularly elected selectman. He helped establish the boundaries of land holdings.[1] It may be that altering his signature from "salter" to "yeoman" signals that he had moved from his original trade to husbandry. He also was engaged in the trade for beaver skins.[1] Everything suggests that he lived a peaceful, prosperous and respectable life in the Salem community.
Legacy
Roger’s wife Sarah lived until at least 1660 and died before March 1678, when he wrote his Will.
They had the following large family of children: [1]
Sarah - b in London, bp St Lawrence Jewry, 19 September 1619; buried 30 October 1620Caleb – b in London, bp St Lawrence Jewry, 27 May 1622; d “beyond seas” before 11 November 1633Lot – b about 1624; his will dated 24 September 1674; m Elizabeth WaltonRoger – b Salem, 1626, “the first born child in Salem”; m Elizabeth WestonSarah – b New England about 1628; m John Leach; named with her children in Roger Conant’s WillJoshua – b about 1630; m Seeth GardnerMary – b about 1632; m (1) John Balch, m (2) William Dodge; d after 4 June 1679Elizabeth – b about 1635; unmarried; alive in 1678Exercise – bp Salem, 24 December 1637; m Sarah ____
Roger’s brother Christopher Conant appears to have left New England by 1630.
On 28 May 1671, Roger Conant, having moved to nearby Beverly Massachusetts, petitioned the court to change the name of the town, citing his life of service to the colony:
. . . when in the infancy thereof, it was in great hazard of being deserted, I was a means, through grace assisting me, to stop the flight of those few that then were here with me, and that by my utter denial to go away with them, who would have gone either for England or mostly for Virginia, but hereupon stayed to the hazard of our lives. [1]
The petition was denied.
Roger Conant died 19 November 1679. His Will was proved 25 November, naming his only surviving son Exercise as executor. His estate was valued at £258, primarily real estate, which was distributed to a large number of family members, most of them grandchildren.
In 1913, the Conant Family Association commissioned a bronze statue of Roger Conant, which can now be seen facing the Salem Common.[9]
For Further Reading
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Conant_(Salem,_Massachusetts_founder)
Frederick Odell Conant. A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America. Portland Maine: 1877. [3]
E. W. Leavitt : "A Genealogy of One Branch of the Conant Family, 1581-1890." Privately printed in 1890
Shipton, Clifford Kenyon. Roger Conant, a Founder of Massachusetts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1945.
George Thomas Little, A. M., Litt. D (Editor). Genealogical and Family History of the STATE OF MAINE. ([Many families included in these genealogical records had their beginnings in Massachusetts.]). Lewis Historical Publishing Company, New York. 1909.
Cutter, William Richard (Editor). New England Families, Genealogical and Memorial, vol I, 1915. page 107.
Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony: Its History & People, 1620-1691, (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986.
Felt, Rev. Joseph B., Notice of Roger Conant, The New England Historical & Genealogical Register (NEHGS, Boston, Mass., 1848) Vol. 2, Page 233-9, Page 329-35.
Edsons in England and America and genealogy of the Edsons; page 88:
Sources
↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Anderson, Robert Charles. Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony 1620-1633. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society. pp 134-143.
↑ Conant-16
↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Salters
↑ London Metropolitan Archives; London, England; Reference Number: P69/ANN/A/002/MS04509/001. Image 17 by subscription at: https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/1624/31281_a101131-00020?pid=5459640 accessed 7 Dec 2019.
↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cushman
↑ 6.0 6.1 Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Charles Dean, ed. p 170. Boston: Little, Brown, 1856. [1]
↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Hubbard, William. A General History of New England. Boston: Charles C Little and James Brown, 1848. pp 102-111[2]
↑ http://www.smplanet.com/teaching/colonialamerica/colonies/dorchester
↑ http://www.noblenet.org/salem/wiki/index.php/Roger_Conant_Statue
See also:
Conant, Frederick Odell. A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America, Thirteen Generations, 1520-1887: Containing Also Some Genealogical Notes on the Connet, Connett and Connit Families. United States: Private print. [Press of Harris & Williams], 1887.
Roger Conant (1592 - 1679)
Roger
Conant
Born 9 Apr 1592
in East Budleigh, Devon, England
ANCESTORS Son of Richard Conant and Agnes (Clarke) ConantBrother of Joan (Conant) Richards, Richard Conant Jr., Robert Conant, Jane (Conant) Wotton, John Conant, Thomas Conant and Christopher ConantHusband of Sarah (Horton) Conant
— married 11 Nov 1618 in St Ann Blackfriars, City of London, EnglandDESCENDANTS Father of Sarah Conant, Caleb Conant, Lot Conant, Roger Conant, Sarah (Conant) Leach, Joshua Conant, Mary (Conant) Dodge, Elizabeth Conant and Exercise ConantDied 19 Nov 1679
in Massachusetts Bay Colony (present day Essex County, Massachusetts, USA)
Profile managers: Jillaine Smith [send private message], Puritan Great Migration Project WikiTree [send private message], Rick Parrott [send private message], John Ellis [send private message], Bill Smith [send private message], and Audrey Neva [send private message]Profile last modified 18 Jun 2021 | Created 11 Mar 2011This page has been accessed 15,075 times.
Roger Conant migrated to New England during the Puritan Great Migration (1620-1640).
Join: Puritan Great Migration Project
Discuss: PGM
Contents
[hide]
1 Biography
1.1 Origins
1.2 Plymouth
1.3 Salem
1.4 Legacy
2 For Further Reading
3 Sources
Biography
The most significant fact about Roger Conant as a leader in the New England colonies is what he was not: he was not a Puritan with divine intent to establish a theocratic commonwealth in the colonies; he was not a wealthy, well-connected investor intent on exploiting the labor of the colonists. In documents at New England, he styled himself “yeoman” .[1] He was a salter, which is to say a working businessman intent on making a living for himself and his family, and he became a leader because people needed leadership under difficult circumstances.
Origins
Roger was baptized on 9 April 1592, the son of Richard Conant and Agnes Clarke of East Budleigh, Devonshire. This was a family of education and religion; one of their sons and two grandsons became ordained ministers of some prominence.[2] Roger’s education equipped him to keep records and accounts as well as survey land – skills that he would put to good use in his life in the colonies. As a young man, he moved to London, where he became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Salters, [3]by January 1620.[1] On 11 November 1618, he married Sarah Horton at St Ann Blackfriars, City of London. [4]By that date, he would have finished his apprenticeship with the guild.
Plymouth
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the fisheries off the coast of New England were of great importance for the English economy. It was necessary to salt the fish for preservation in transport, which drew Roger Conant to the region only a few years after the first successful permanent settlement: the Pilgrim Plymouth colony. It appears that Roger was sent by Robert Cushman[5] of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in aid of promoting the fishery trade at the colony, possibly traveling in the Charity with the Reverend John Lyford, also sent by the Adventurers to be a minister of religion there. If so, this would go a way to explaining the course of subsequent events at Plymouth.
Conant, while a puritan and a godly man, was not a Pilgrim, was a stranger and newcomer to the colony on his arrival in 1624, as was Lyford. William Bradford, Plymouth’s elected Governor, accused Lyford of promoting religious practices of the established English church among the settlers – practices that the Pilgrims had come to America to escape. After Lyford and a fellow dissident, John Oldham, were expelled from the colony, Roger Conant withdrew as well.
There are two strongly contradictory accounts of Roger Conant in Plymouth. Bradford wrote: “. . . he whom they sent to make salt was an ignorant, foolish, selfwilled fellow.”[6] William Hubbard, on the other hand, called him “a religious, sober and prudent gentleman.”[7] Bradford’s account is so full of malice, spite, and self-serving – and intercepting Lyford’s private correspondence - it is hard to credit, but Hubbard’s version is no less partisan.
Roger Conant was probably not in Plymouth for more than six months, not long enough to receive a grant of land, as his brother Christopher had when arriving the year before on the Anne. (The minimum amount: one acre.) He removed in 1624 to a location called Nantasket by the native Americans, then to Cape Ann, where the Plymouth colony had earlier attempted to set up a fishery.[1]
In 1623, a group of investors led by Reverend John White, called the Dorchester Company,[8] had brought a small number of colonists to Cape Ann to a settlement they named Gloucester, and in 1625 they invited Roger Conant to move there as governor of the place. Conflict soon ensued, as Captain Miles Standish came from Plymouth with an armed group, claiming encroachment. Hubbard praised Conant for making peace, with harsh words for Standish.[7] Bradford blamed Conant for the outpost’s failure, alleging that he incompetently set the place on fire.[6]
The Dorchester group withdrew its funding by the end of the year, and the colony broke up, with Roger Conant leading a small band west to settle a more promising situation in Naumkeag, soon to be renamed Salem.[7]
Salem
Reverend John White made another attempt at settlement, receiving a patent from the Council for New England that allowed him the rights to Naumkeag. The new governor, John Endicott, replaced Roger Conant in that office and renamed the town. The next year, Endicott and his company acquired a royal charter, becoming a corporation under the name the "Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England.” This time, Conant remained. He received substantial land grants, built the first house in Salem, and was admitted as a freeman of the town in 1631. This, in Salem, meant that he had previously been accepted as a member of the Salem church.[1]
For the next twenty-five years, Roger Conant filled a variety of civic offices, serving as a Deputy to the Court, a magistrate, a member of juries. He was regularly elected selectman. He helped establish the boundaries of land holdings.[1] It may be that altering his signature from "salter" to "yeoman" signals that he had moved from his original trade to husbandry. He also was engaged in the trade for beaver skins.[1] Everything suggests that he lived a peaceful, prosperous and respectable life in the Salem community.
Legacy
Roger’s wife Sarah lived until at least 1660 and died before March 1678, when he wrote his Will.
They had the following large family of children: [1]
Sarah - b in London, bp St Lawrence Jewry, 19 September 1619; buried 30 October 1620Caleb – b in London, bp St Lawrence Jewry, 27 May 1622; d “beyond seas” before 11 November 1633Lot – b about 1624; his will dated 24 September 1674; m Elizabeth WaltonRoger – b Salem, 1626, “the first born child in Salem”; m Elizabeth WestonSarah – b New England about 1628; m John Leach; named with her children in Roger Conant’s WillJoshua – b about 1630; m Seeth GardnerMary – b about 1632; m (1) John Balch, m (2) William Dodge; d after 4 June 1679Elizabeth – b about 1635; unmarried; alive in 1678Exercise – bp Salem, 24 December 1637; m Sarah ____
Roger’s brother Christopher Conant appears to have left New England by 1630.
On 28 May 1671, Roger Conant, having moved to nearby Beverly Massachusetts, petitioned the court to change the name of the town, citing his life of service to the colony:
. . . when in the infancy thereof, it was in great hazard of being deserted, I was a means, through grace assisting me, to stop the flight of those few that then were here with me, and that by my utter denial to go away with them, who would have gone either for England or mostly for Virginia, but hereupon stayed to the hazard of our lives. [1]
The petition was denied.
Roger Conant died 19 November 1679. His Will was proved 25 November, naming his only surviving son Exercise as executor. His estate was valued at £258, primarily real estate, which was distributed to a large number of family members, most of them grandchildren.
In 1913, the Conant Family Association commissioned a bronze statue of Roger Conant, which can now be seen facing the Salem Common.[9]
For Further Reading
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Conant_(Salem,_Massachusetts_founder)
Frederick Odell Conant. A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America. Portland Maine: 1877. [3]
E. W. Leavitt : "A Genealogy of One Branch of the Conant Family, 1581-1890." Privately printed in 1890
Shipton, Clifford Kenyon. Roger Conant, a Founder of Massachusetts. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1945.
George Thomas Little, A. M., Litt. D (Editor). Genealogical and Family History of the STATE OF MAINE. ([Many families included in these genealogical records had their beginnings in Massachusetts.]). Lewis Historical Publishing Company, New York. 1909.
Cutter, William Richard (Editor). New England Families, Genealogical and Memorial, vol I, 1915. page 107.
Eugene Aubrey Stratton, Plymouth Colony: Its History & People, 1620-1691, (Salt Lake City: Ancestry Publishing, 1986.
Felt, Rev. Joseph B., Notice of Roger Conant, The New England Historical & Genealogical Register (NEHGS, Boston, Mass., 1848) Vol. 2, Page 233-9, Page 329-35.
Edsons in England and America and genealogy of the Edsons; page 88:
Sources
↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Anderson, Robert Charles. Pilgrim Migration: Immigrants to Plymouth Colony 1620-1633. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society. pp 134-143.
↑ Conant-16
↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Salters
↑ London Metropolitan Archives; London, England; Reference Number: P69/ANN/A/002/MS04509/001. Image 17 by subscription at: https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/1624/31281_a101131-00020?pid=5459640 accessed 7 Dec 2019.
↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cushman
↑ 6.0 6.1 Bradford, William. History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, Charles Dean, ed. p 170. Boston: Little, Brown, 1856. [1]
↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Hubbard, William. A General History of New England. Boston: Charles C Little and James Brown, 1848. pp 102-111[2]
↑ http://www.smplanet.com/teaching/colonialamerica/colonies/dorchester
↑ http://www.noblenet.org/salem/wiki/index.php/Roger_Conant_Statue
See also:
Conant, Frederick Odell. A History and Genealogy of the Conant Family in England and America, Thirteen Generations, 1520-1887: Containing Also Some Genealogical Notes on the Connet, Connett and Connit Families. United States: Private print. [Press of Harris & Williams], 1887.
Events
| Birth | 9 Apr 1592 | East Budleigh, Devon, England | |||
| Marriage | Sarah Horton | ||||
| Death | Massachusetts |
Families
| Spouse | Sarah Horton (1598 - 1667) |
| Child | Lot Connant (1624 - 1674) |