Robert Royce

• General Notes
  • Savage claimed the Robert Roice of Boston was identical with a man of the same name who appeared in Connectifcut some years later, but since the latter had wife Mary, and the only known wife of the Boston man was Elizabeth, who outlived him, this cannot be true.
    
    Robert came from England in the Francis; settled at Stratford, CT, in 1644/48; at New London, 1660; Member of City Council.
    
    Robert was a freeman at Boston 1 Apr 1634, one of the disarmed 1637 as a supporter of Mrs. Hutchinson in her revelations, or of Wheelwright in his opinions, had removed before 1657 to New London, perhaps in 1650 was of Stratford, but constable in 1660 and in 1661 representative for New London where he lived in good repute.
    
    Clarence Leslie Hewitt, Jr., argues in his article "Some light on the marriage of Robert and Mary Royce of Connecticut" in New Eng. Hist. Gen. Reg. 122 (1968): 274-277 that Mary, Robert's wife was not Mary Sims, Simms, or Symmes, of Long Sutton, Somerset. There was a Robert Royce who married a Mary Sims in Long Sutton on 4 Jun 1624. Hewitt says the "1624 wedding hardly works out, credibly or chronologically, with their emigration to America or the birthday of their first born. ... It would therefore seem most unlikely that Robert and Mary would have remained continent or been barren from 1624 to 1634 or that all their children born in that decade could have perished in infancy." It remains a possibility, though, that they could have been married in 1624 and all their children from the first ten years died.
    
    Joseph Savage, Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, Originally published 1860.
    
    Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins: immigrants to New England 1620-1633, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, 1995, Three volumes.
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    He was a shoemaker, then a highly regarded and valuable trade. His antecedents are unknown, however, and he first appears in the historical record in Stratford in 1648 when land was recorded in his name in that town. He was appointed to the General Court in 1656 and was made leather sealer for the town.
    
    He moved to New London not long afterwards and was named constable in that town in May 1660. In 1661 he was chosen as a deputy to the General Court and was town leather sealer in 1662 and 1667, tax collector in 1667, and townsman in 1668. He entertained the new minister, the Reverend Simon Bradstreet, for sometime after his arrival in town and the town voted "to Goodman Royce for ye ministers dyet, 15 lb."
    
    Ernest Flagg, The Founding of New England (The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Co., Hartford, Connecticut, 1926)
    
    
    

Click here for details of Robert's family with Mary ?Sims?

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