William Bucklin – Biography
Including, among other things, the two vs. one William theories,
and the 1645 vs.1656 move from Hingham theories
Thesis: The evidence favors there being one William Bucklin (aka Buckland):
- who lived in the area of Buckland-Ripers, Dorset, England;
- who first came to the New England of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (MBC) with the Winthrop fleet of 1630;
- who was the same William Bucklin that brought his family to Hingham, MBC, in 1634, via the ship Elizabeth Dorcas (chartered “by John Winthrop”);
- who moved from Hingham in about 1645, to what is now Pawtucket, RI;
- who was the same William Bucklin that in 1660 was the owner of more land in what is now Rhode Island than any other person of the area; and
- who was the father of the unbroken line of five Joseph Bucklins; the last of which fired the shot that Rhode Island claims as “The first shot of the Revolution.”
The one WILLIAM thesis. Charles Edward Banks, in his two authoritative books, The Winthrop Fleet of 1630, and Planters of the Commonwealth, records that William Bucklin came to New England in the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s ships of 1630 (“Winthrop fleet of 1630”). There is no known regular passenger list of the passengers in the various ships of the Winthrop fleet, but Winthrop did keep a journal in which he apparently tried to record most of the persons traveling in that initial group of ships with him. William’s name does show up on Winthrop’s journal notes, where Winthrop records William as being a “servant of John Plaistow” That note by Winthrop is what Bank’s uses for his report of William’s immigration.
Plaistow was a gentleman, from Essex. Space was limited in the Winthrop fleet ships. Only persons with the formal rank of nobility or of the formal rank of “gentleman” had space or temporary cabins on the upper deck. Even having sufficient money to pay for a cabin on deck, or being a member of an extended family in which someone was nobility, did not qualify a person for having a cabin on the deck. However, those having cabins on deck did have the privilege of their servants attending them in their cabin. Winthrop’s note that William was on board as a “servant” of Plaistow means that William had the privilege denied others of ready and daily access to the upper deck.
The William Bucklin of Hingham of 1634 we know of with certainty was a man of inventive intelligence in building a successful life in New England. Such a person could easily have considered it good strategy for a man who wished to save money on an exploratory and expensive trip to New England, and who also realized the huge advantages of not being confined below decks with most of the passengers, to agree to be a servant for a period of time for a gentleman immigrating to New England. The William Bucklin of Hingham of 1634 we know of with certainty was a carpenter of more than usual skill. Plaistow was a gentleman of the time in England when it was considered improper for a man of rank to do hard manual labor. Plaistow seems to have brought with him two male servants, and it would be logical for one of them to be a carpenter and the other a farmer, the two occupations most needed by a man of rank in a New England venture.
William’s relationship to Plaistow got William before a court. In September 1631, Plaistow took four baskets of corn belonging to “Chickatabot”, a Native American. For this theft, Plaistow was degraded by court order from the title of gentleman, ordered to restore eight baskets of corn to Chickatabot, and to pay a fine of five pounds to the Colony. “His men William Buckland and Thomas Andrew” were ordered to be whipped for being accessories (i.e., not for doing the actual stealing, but for either helping Plaistow or not reporting the theft). Although the MBC Court decreed that Plaistow’s rank of “gentleman” was stripped from him, the legality of such a penalty would be difficult to sustain in the law courts of England, where taking by violence from the native people of the colony was accepted as not contrary to the laws of England. After Plaistow was safely gone back to England , then the Massachusetts Bay Court confiscated and sold the New England lands of Plaistow to pay for debts Plaistow had left on his forced departure back to England.
Plaistow received an additional punishment. Governor Winthrop was determined that his new colony should be a godly community; therefore, the early Massachusetts Bay Colony sent back to England those persons who were causing social problems.
Now let us turn for a moment to the “two Williams thesis”, which we disagree with. After that we will come back to the Hingham records, which lend further support to the “one William thesis.”
The two WILLIAMS thesis. Some researchers have surmised that there were two William Bucklins: one arriving in 1630 and the other in 1634. Some authors have noted that the William Buckland/Bucklin of the era 1645 had a son Joseph, who was born in 1633, in England, and Joseph came with his mother to American in 1634. This has led some authors into saying that William first came to the New World in 1634 on the ship Elizabeth Dorcas.
We do agree that if William was the father of Joseph, then William was in England in before 1634. Carl Boyer III, in his book Ancestral Lines, says that the government authorities detained the ship Elizabeth Dorcas at Gravesend, Eng., from 22 Feb 1634 until the early spring of 1634 waiting for a determination that all passengers had secured the necessary papers (i.e., that they were Church of England members) for immigration. William’s son Joseph came in that ship. From the fact of the age of Joseph at his death, we can deduce that Joseph was born in 1633 and his father William was in England no later than early 1633.
Although the “Two Williams thesis” is possible, we favor the “One William thesis,” to wit: that the William Bucklin who arrived in 1630 was the same William Bucklin who arrived (returned) in 1634.
Although William was a common name, Buckland was not a generally common name of England. Given the small number of immigrates before 1635, It is more likely than not that only one William Bucklin, not two, decided in a three year window to take passage in the Winthrop fleet ships, and both decided to live the same few square miles on the south shore of the Boston bay. (Plaistow, whose “servant” William Bucklin was in 1631, had landholdings in the area of Dorchester/Hingham, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (MBC), the same area in which we find William Bucklin with his family in 1634.
We are certain of the Winthrop note, which clearly has William Bucklin on board one of the vessels of the 1630 Winthrop fleet. Aside from the records of the Court of the Colony, the only records the Colony maintained with determined rigor in the 1630’s were the birth, marriage, and death records. We are certain that those records contain no note of a death of William Bucklin or Buckland or Buckler before 1634 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. We therefore can state that the William Bucklin who arrived in 1630 did not die in the Colony before 1634. In 1634 there was only one William Bucklin in the Colony, according to the written records
There is only one William Bucklin in the Colony before 1631. There was only one William Bucklin in 1634.
Recall that as a part of the sentence for theft, the Court ordered Plaistow sent back to England. Buckland and Andrew were not the subject of a court order (as was Plaistow) sending them back to England. However, under the social expectations of the time, it would be assumed that if a man with servants was going back to England, it would be expected that his servants would be going with him under their obligation to attend their master. Indeed, if they were servants under a legal indenture to serve, the law required the servants to go where the master went. (An indenture of service is a legal precaution that would be taken by someone like Plaistow bringing servants with him: the indenture prevents a servant quitting and leaving the master without a servant the master had paid the ship passage and food for the servant to get to New England.) Plaistow was a man who did not work, thinking it beneath his social status. Thus, although there is no direct evidence of a return by William, as a servant with Plaistow, to England, it is highly likely. Like the people of that time, hearing of Plaistow’s forced return to England, we can assume that with his servant William would have retuned to England with Plaistow on a ship before June 1632 .(Date established that Plaistow was no longer in the Colony.)
Further, if Plaistow had left New England under court order, and left his land that he owned there (which he did), one would expect his servants to stay on the property if they did not return to England with him. In June, 1632, creditors of Plaistow had the MBC Court confiscate and sell Plaistow’s land to pay the debts Plaistow had left on his departure to England. Under English law, if the lands were the subject of a court proceedings, the court proceedings would have to have named the persons residing on the property as defendants and would need to specifically decree them to ejected from the property. The court proceedings do not name William or Plaistow’s other servant, which again indicates they had gone back to England with their master. The “One William Thesis” does incorporate all the known facts and is consistent with all the known facts. The One William Thesis is that that William first came to America as servant to Plaistow in 1630, then returned to England with Plaistow in 1631, and then came back to New England a second time, after fathering Joseph in 1632-1633.
All records indicate that in 1634, William’s wife (Mary Bosworth) arrived with son Joseph, Mary’s brothers and their mother into Boston harbor in 1634. One Bosworth brother may have been in Boston earlier — Jonathan Bosworth shows up in Cambridge Town records as early as 7 Jan 1632/1633 and again in 5 Aug 1633. However, instead of staying with the Bosworths in Boston, William, Mary, and their son Joseph show up as going to the same Dorchester / Hingham area where Plaistow had lived with his servant William Bucklin. There they would have found that Plaistow’s land had been confiscated for debts of Plaistow, and it is there in that Hingham area where William Bucklin had lived with Plaistow that William received a land grant in Hingham.
All records are consistent there was only one (not two) William Bucklin/Buckland/Buckler living at the same time in the Colony’s area of Hingham/Dorchester/Weymouth on the south shore of Boston Bay.
Our conclusion: the William Bucklin in Hingham in 1634 is the same William Bucklin who lived in the Hingham area in 1630.
Oral Tradition of Immigration from “Wey”, England, to the Bay Colony
The oral tradition, established at least before 1900 was that : “William Bucklin came from Wey [sic], England, which was a shipbuilding center at the time. It was at the mouth of the Wey river.” [1920’s oral history from George Bucklin of Minnesota, to his children Leonard, Ethel, and Marie.] “Wey” is a place name not known generally today, so there often is a tendency of researchers today to assume that “Wey” is a mistaken or shortened form of “Weymouth”, England. However, there is a place that in the 17th century was named “Wey”! That is: inland from the present town of Weymouth is Radipole. In Roman times, the tidal basin of the river Wey furnished a harbor at “Wey”. For several centuries, until the tidal basin became too shallow for ships and the harbor moved southward, Radipole was known as Wey. Radipole, a.k.a., Wey would be a place where ships were built.
Also, according to pre-1930 handwritten notes of George Bucklin of Minnesota, there was a plot of Bucklin graves by the church at ” Wey”, with a large central shaft among the Bucklin family graves. Indeed. there is a church with graves in Radipole (Wey). The church at Radipole (Wey) does in fact have a large central shaft in the graveyard. Although the shaft has Lethbridge as the main name, the Lethbridge and Buckler families were connected and there is in the graveyard a tomb for a family named Buckler. Because “Bucklin” and “Buckler” are both Old English pronunciation variations of “Buckland”, the oral history is consistent with the Radipole cemetery as the “Wey” burial place of the ancestors of William Bucklin
Radipole is about 1 mile across the fields from the town of Buckland-Ripers. Radipole has a substantial house which was the house of Andrew Buckler in the 1500’s. This house, known as the “Causeway House” is at a bridge over the Wey, at what would in previous centuries been the head of the tidal basin, a logical place for a shipwright to live. The Causeway House is associated with the “Buckler” name. Because Bucklin and Buckler are both easy early pronunciation variations of “Buckland”, the oral tradition of William Bucklin being a shipwright out of Wey is again consistent with the facts otherwise available.
The Causeway House is noted in the registers of St. Anne’s church as having several persons “out of the house of Andrew Buckler…dying of ye plage” in 1563.
The family of the Causeway House had substantial wealth, and although members were not titled as nobles, one member was as a Privy Counselor at the court of Elizabeth I, and the house was associated with a family of which the members could well be accorded the title of “gentleman.”. Again this is consistent with the fact that when William Bucklin came to New England he early seemed to have much more cash than the average immigrant, being able to buy substantial amounts of land. Further, the earliest history of Pawtucket states that William Bucklin was always referred to as “Goodman Bucklin”, the way in which persons titled as gentleman were addressed as the time.
The oral tradition of William Bucklin being a shipwright is again consistent with the fact that although William was not a member of the Newman Church (indeed had beliefs that kept him outside that church), and had sufficient land and interests to keep him busy without hiring out as a carpenter, William was hired to do major renovation/construction on the Newman Church in the period of 1656 – 1660. There is no sensible reason for the church asking the major landowner of the area to furnish carpenter work, except that William must have had carpenter skills that were recognized as being exceptional for the area.
Also, there is no logical reason for the oral tradition of the Bucklin family to say that William came from “Wey” except a foundation of true fact. The ships of the Winthrop fleet did not sail from Weymouth (rather from London), but the Weymouth area was a major contributor of immigrates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This contribution can be traced to the powerful influence of the Weymouth church pastor, John White, who was in the very center of the great religious and political controversies that were to divide England during the rest of the 17th century. For religious reasons, White encouraged his church members in Weymouth to leave with the Winthrop fleet for New England.
Further support for the Weymouth area as being William’s point of origin of emigration, is the fact that in 1634, the persons in Hingham (of which William was one) were generally from Dorchester (Dorset, England). (The 1634 group was not from Hingham, England, which is in Norfolk, north of London, not near Dorchester in Dorset.)
That era 1634 immigration of Dorchester, England, area persons to the south shore of Boston harbor accounts for the place names of “Weymouth” and “Dorchester” on the south shore of the Massachusetts Bay near Hingham (MBC). [Dorchester (MBC) is just north of Hingham (MBC). Hingham, Dorchester, and Weymouth were grouped together in one Quarter Court area when the system of Quarter Courts was established in 1635 (MBCR 1:169).]
It should be noted that the original group of persons settling the Hingham area, before 1634, were from the Lincoln, and Leicester (central part of England) as were the Bosworths and John Plaistow. This could suggest that the William Bucklin of our interest was also from that area, and not from the Weymouth (Dorset) area of England. However, the ship carrying Plaistow to New England stopped in the Weymouth area to take on others and supplies, and the ship carrying Plaistow (and any servants with him) back to England would probably have taken him to London for disembarking. Our suspicion (no real facts) is that it was on the return with Plaistow to Lincoln / Leicester that William met and married Mary Bosworth.
Mary’s Arrival in Hingham
The Bosworth Genealogy asserts that in Hingham, “Atlantic Ave was where the ship “Elizabeth brought the wife of William Buckland” (Mary Bosworth), his small son Joseph Bucklin, her mother Mary Bosworth and her brothers and father.” Significantly, this careful researcher did not find evidence that William Buckland also came on the same ship at the same time.
Henry Sewall, a passenger on the Elizabeth Dorcas. in 1634 lent some money to the Bosworth family to help pay the ship for the passage of Bosworth family (including Bucklin’s wife and child). Because what we know of William Bucklin indicates he had a relatively large amount of cash in New England, this again indicates that William was not on the ship which brought his wife.
On 7 July 1635, at Plymouth Court, the court ordered William Buckland, and three Bosworths (Jonathan, Nathaniel, and Benjamin Bosworth) to each pay Sewall a quarter of the amount owed to Sewall. (William’s father in law had died during the ship journey and any cash he had would have ordinarily have passed into the hands of his sons on board) Only William paid his share at once. The Bosworths only paid incomplete amounts, at intervals, at various later dates.
The fact that William was ordered to pay 1/4 of the passage of 7 people (his wife, his son, his father in law, his mother in law, and three brothers in law) but no mention of a charge for his own passage, again is consistent with William not being on the ship, and not having contracted with the ship master for passage of his wife and child or his in-laws before the ship left England.
The Hingham Records
By 1635 William was a “proprietor” of Hingham. The 1635 Hingham records start the documented lines of residence, births and deaths of the Bucklin family. One can trace the William Bucklin line with certainty after that point in time.
Hingham is one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts. The original settlers, in 1633, came from Hingham, Norfolk County, England, and settled in what was then known as Bare Cove. Hingham lay close to a later town named Weymouth by the English settlers of Weymouth. The nearby river was by 1665 known as the Weymouth River, which was one of the boundaries to the land stated in a grant from the Indians to the Hingham town fathers in that year. Hingham lay on the border-line between the jurisdictions of the Plymouth Colony (Mayflower Separatists) and the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Winthrop Puritans) ; and seems mostly to have been a result of the influx of colonists with the Winthrop organization.
In 1635 William received a town lot of five acres, located in what is now West Hingham. The Hingham records say:
“In 1635 Wm. Buckland was given a Town Lot and Our Lot at the foot of Otis Hill.”
The land was said to be on the north side of Weary-All Hill. A 1930’s researcher of Bucklin history asserted that the hill is now called Otis Hill, and that the Hingham railroad depot in the 1930’s was the place where William had his lot.
After 1635, William acquired several additional parcels of realty, in Hingham, Rehoboth, and Attleboro. He sold his house and land in Hingham on 25 May 1661, long after he lived in Rehoboth.
An inventory of 22 Sep 1642 of the estate of Capt. Bozan Allen (a ship captain and merchant) of Hingham lists William as a debtor owing the estate a sum of money. Because William seemed to have sufficient cash at all times, and ordinarily paid promptly when the contracted time of payment arrived, this estate debt suggests some sort of outstanding business venture between Allen and Bucklin in Hingham.
Hingham (MBC) has an interesting and turbulent early history. The first settlers were a band of single and not entirely savory men, who came from the London area. These single men arrived because of their thesis that earlier settlers had not done well because the early settlers had been encumbered with families and religion. By William’s ca. 1633 era entry to Hingham, these earlier first settlers had given way to the religious, family oriented type of persons characteristic of the Winthrop fleet. These after 1633 settlers brought men of substance from the Dorchester England area who wanted to run Hingham their way, to the discomfort of the Bay Colony government.
About 1645 the town of Hingham was in uproar, with some men being jailed for disobedience in regard to who were to be the officers of the town militia, and the town of Hingham seeking the impeachment of Governor Winthrop. We think these 1645 events in Hingham may be significant to Bucklin family history, because, as is noted below, the first mention of William Bucklin having a real property interest in Pawtucket is in 1645.
Bucklin’s 1645 of Earlier Movement to Pawtucket
In 1636, Roger Willliams had settled in the Rehoboth, Rhode Island area (on the east side of the Pawtucket River) when he first fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When told that the Plymouth Colony claimed this land, he moved to the west bank of the river and called his new settlement “Providence”. The east bank of the river, Seekonk (Pawtucket) continued to be an area of homes of religious dissenters who were not approved by the Plymouth Colony for settlement in that area Near Hingham is Weymouth. Weymouth was the site of religious dissension lead by Rev. Samuel Newman. Newman and a part of his congregation, for religious reasons, decided to leave the settled Plymouth Colony and move to the Rhode Island area of religious dissenters.
The Newman congregational group purchased land in 1643 in what is now Pawtucket, Massachusetts. Rehoboth was on the east side of the Pawtucket River and about three miles from the Falls which were the heart of Pawtucket and the Jenks industrial community. The Rehoboth area had been purchased from the Indians in 1641 by John Hasel. By 1642 John Hasel resided there with 600 acres he thus owned on the Pawtucket River.
The land on the East side of Narragansett Bay was claimed by the Plymouth Colony as being part of the grant of lands for the Plymouth Colony. (More exactly, the grant by the King was to certain gentlemen, who were supposed to hold the land in their name and distribute it to others as they felt appropriate to the colony. William Bradford was one of the original grantees, and he had reserved the land on the East side of Narragansett Bay for his own ownership.) in 1649, Hazels was sued in the Plymouth Court in 1649, and lost. The land in the litigation was described in the litigation in the same metes and bounds description that Bucklin used in describing his purchase of land from Edward Smith which had purchased it from John Hazels at some time. The legal thesis of the time would have made the Plymouth Court’s judgment of title against Hazels of no effect against Smith, so one suspects that when the litigation was threatened, Hazels then sold the land to Smith..
Today the east side of the land of John Hazel is almost the same bounds as the east side of Pawtucket, RI. ( The former Rehoboth, MA, is now partly in East Providence, RI, and partly in Pawtucket, RI.
[ Note: The sequence of town names is that there first was the area known as Seconet or Seekonk. In 1645 Seconet became Rehoboth. Rehoboth as a town purchased land to the north of the land of William Bucklin, which land was known as the “North Purchase”. Attleboro, mentioned in some records in connection with the Bucklin family, became a separate town when it separated from Rehoboth in 1694 as the North Purchase land. Attleboro exchanged land with Rehoboth in 1710. Pawtucket was a separate town, originally only on the west side of the river, subsequently on both sides. Pawtucket only because a part of Rhode Island in 1862.]
At about the same time of the move of the Hingham church group of the Rev. Newman and his group, to Rehoboth for religious reasons, William seems to have been involved in a move to the Rehoboth area. William decided to move west, across the short distance from the Bay Colony to the bay/river edge of Rehoboth.
William’s wife and her parents were Quakers. William and his sons in New England were Baptists. As a result, William never joined the church of Rev. Newman, and probably did not move “with” the Newman congregation to the Rehoboth area. More likely, William moved when it appeared the Newman congregation was going to move there, and when William discovered that the 600 acres of John Hasels were available for his purchase.
William’s house was in the area of the purchase of John Hasels. A large 600 acre tract of land on the east bank of the Pawtucket River had been purchased by John Hasels from the Indians, but the Plymouth colony insisted that they had jurisdiction over the land. Hasels divested himself of the land at the insistence of the colony, by selling to Edward Smith, who in turn had the same sort of troubles about the right to be on the land.
The Rehoboth Town Meeting Records of 1 Feb 1645 state:
“…At the same time the way to William Buckland’s house is agreed on by those partyes which it doth conform.”
Thus, it seems clear that at least by 1645 William had a house on his own property, and a common roadway through someone’s property was agreed upon. Elsewhere, we suggest that it was only Hasels and Bucklin that would have any interest in recording such an agreement, as resolving a roadway over Hasels land to land sold to Bucklin. See Rehoboth Area land ownership details.
The date of 1656 is given by some researchers as the date when William moved to Rehoboth, MA, from Hingham. Apparently this date mistakenly was chosen by them, in preference to the 1645 date (or earlier) by which he had a house on the land, because these researchers only had available to them the 1656 Old Proprietary Records of Rehoboth which show that at a Town Meeting in 1656, William Bucklin then recorded his land as:
“600 acres of land wch John Hasels wch I bought of Edward Smith bounded on Pawtucket River on the west & unto a Run yt somes from the cedar swamp on the east upon the south with lands yt was John Reads and upon the north the common as we go to Mr. Blaxtons.”
Unless William obtained this land by some sort of credit, it seems that William was a man of some wealth, since he at that time also owned land in Hingham, and his 600 acres north of Rehoboth were about a square mile of land, and included the most valuable land in the area. Bucklin’s land area was almost equal to land holdings of the entire congregation of Rev. Newman in their Rehoboth settlement.
I see nothing inconsistent with (1) William moving to the Rehoboth area (Pawtucket) in 1645, and settling by purchase or other agreement on the Hasels land, when the way to his house was agreed upon and noted in the town records, and (2) when Hasels and Smith had their title difficulties with the Plymouth Colony in the late 1640’s then buying the whole 600 acres from Hasels, with Smith, a Providence resident, acting as a middleman. With the land being the subject of attention of the Plymouth Colony, it would be prudent not to record in public records an ownership that came from others than the Plymouth Colony. Significantly, it was about the time that William recorded his land with the town of Rehoboth that Bradford and the Plymouth Colony had completed compromising with the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Rhode Island whether and where the Plymouth Colony owned land on the Narragansett Bay. Certainly, until about 1650 this area in Rehoboth was one that gave its purchasers trouble with the Plymouth Colony or the Massachusetts Bay Colony, especially if the claim was that the title initially came from a purchase from the Indians instead of through the King of England and his patentees.
William was not a member of the “Newman” church in Pawtucket, but he did carpenter work on the church. William’s son Joseph and many Bucklins were buried in the church graveyard.
In 1656 William was chosen to serve on a grand jury in Rehoboth. Again, this suggests that William was not a newcomer in 1656 but instead already was well established in the area. By English common law and the early tradition of the Bay Colony the grand jury was selected from men who were well acquainted with the persons and affairs of the area. The common law was that these grand jurymen, using their own knowledge, were to accuse those who deserved punishment, not a job for a newcomer to the area.
On 17 March 1657, William and Peter Hunt were engaged to enlarge the meeting house. On 9 Dec 1659, William was appointed, with a Lieut. Hunt, to
“shingle the new end of the meeting house & to be done sufficiently as the new end of Goodman Paynes house, and they are to find nail & to be done by May day next ensuring provided that the frame is up in season–in consideration whereof they are to have 8 pounds to be paid in good merchantable wampum when their work is done”
According to the Plymouth Colony Records for 23 Feb 1657 William took on that day the oath of Fidelity, if not before, and therefore was listed in the colony’s records as a “freeman” (which simply meant someone who had taken the formal oath of allegiance to the colonial government). The oath may have been in connection with the fact that the same day at the town meeting for Rehoboth certain men agreed to go see what meadows they could find north of the town. This land subsequently became known as the North Purchase and was immediately to the north of the Bucklin land on the river.
William sold land in Hingham on May 25, 1661. This suggests that William had capital that could be invested in land other than where he lived, because it is sure from the Pawtucket records that his residence must have been in Pawtucket for several years before he sold the land in Hingham. Hence William must have been renting out the Hingham house for years.
The exact line between the north side of Bucklin’s land and the south border of the North Purchase was often in dispute for years after the 1657 North Purchase. On April 18, 1666, it was voted that a three rail fence be set up between the purchased lands on the plain “from Goodman Buckland’s house to the Mill River” , separating Bucklin’s land from the North Purchase land.
At Rehoboth, MA, William participated in lot divisions of 1668, for these meadows north of the town which were referred to as the “North Purchase.” The “North Purchase” was later established(1694) as the town of Attleboro, in Bristol County, Massachusetts with about 180 inhabitants.
Source Notes:
WILLIAM2 BUCKLIN (JOHN1BUCKLAND)
(Source: (1) Charles Edward Banks, The Winthrop Fleet of 1630, Genealogical Publishing Co., 1930.,
(2) James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, The First Settlers of New England, Little Brown, Boston (1862).,
(3) James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, The First Settlers of New England, Little Brown, Boston (1862), “spelling Buckland, sometimes Backline, removed Rehoboth 1658.”.,
(4) Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, Little, Brown & Co., 91958).,
(5) Charles Henry Pope, Pioneers of Massachusetts, Genealogical Pub Co. (1965), p 76 and p 364.,
(6) Susan M Boucher, History of Pawtucket 1635-1976, (Pawtucket Public Library, Pawtucket, RI 1976), p 37(Rehoboth-Pawtucket early history and Hasel land).,
(7) Susan M Boucher, History of Pawtucket 1635-1976, (Pawtucket Public Library, Pawtucket, RI 1976), pp. 14-18 (Roger Williams information).)
was born 1609 in Dorset, England, and died 01 September 1683 in Rehoboth, Bristol, MA (Source: James Savage, Genealogical Dictionary, The First Settlers of New England, Little Brown, Boston (1862).). He married MARY BOSWORTH (Source: Hattie B. Cooper, Squire Bucklin of Foster, RI. His Ancestors back to William Hingham Bucklin and His Descendants, Roxbury, MS (1944). Typescript at the New England Hist. & Gene Society..) Abt. 1629 in England, daughter of EDWARD BOSWORTH and MARY.
Appointed: 03 June 1656, Rehobeth, MA – Grand Juryman (Source: John C. Erhardt, Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 89.)
Burial: 16 September 1679, Attleboro, MA (Source: Rehoboth Vital Records, 1/56.)
Christening: 23 November 1606, Branscombe, Devon, England (Source: LDS Ancestral File, Family Group Records, For ANF; 8HDB-NC in LDS ancestral File.)
Contributed: 1676, for King Phillip’s War (Source: John C. Erhardt, Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 378.)
Court Record: September 1631 (Source: Charles Henry Pope, Pioneers of Massachusets, Genealogical Pub Co. (1965), p 364.)
Emigration: 1630, England (Source: Charles Edward Banks, The Winthrop Fleet of 1630, Genealogical Publishing Co., 1930, p.62 (“William Buckland….Servant of Josiah Plaistow”).)
Land Obtained: 1635, Hingham, MA [Source: George Lincoln, History of Hingham,(1893), ,published by the town in 1893.].
Record: 18 April 1666, Rehobeth, MA – Fence Erected (Source: John C. Erhardt, Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 176, Disputes about the exact line of the North Purchase and Bucklin’s land lead to a committee chosen to decide and “there shall be a three railed fence set up and maintained, between the late purchased land on the north side of the towne, ..from Goodman Buckland’s lands to the Mill river….”)
Status: 22 February 1657/58, Freeman of Rehoboth (Source: John C. Erhardt, Rehoboth, Plymouth Colony 1645-1692, 94, “accepted as freemen of the town…William Buckland.”)
Notes for MARY BOSWORTH:
There is a Bosworth Genealogy which gives her birth year as about 1611.
Some suggestions that the Bosworths were Quakers, which may explain William’s early move from Boston and Hingham, to Rehoboth, the area of the Williams settlement.
Notes indicating she came on the ship Elizabeth Dorcas fit the facts. The ship Elizabeth Dorcas left London for New England on 10 Apr 1634 “by John Winthrop” and sailed back and forth regularly between 1634 and 1639, but always from London.
Burial: 28 July 1687, Attleboro, MA (Source: Attleboro Town Records.)
Immigration: 1634 (Source: National Genealogical Society Quarterly, England, Sep 1985.)