William Adams

Abt 1620 - 1659  (~ 39 years)

• Name	William Adams  [1, 2, 3]
  Birth	Abt 1620  [4, 5]
  Gender	Male
  Death	Jan 1659	Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts   [4, 6]
  Alternate death	18 Jan 1659	Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts
  Person ID	I20492	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of BJS, Ancestor of JTS, Ancestor of TWK
  Last Modified	18 Aug 2022

  
  

  Father	William Adams   d. Aft 1637, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts
  Mother	(Unknown wife of William Adams)   d. 1681, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts
  Family ID	F12655	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family	Elizabeth Stacy,   b. 1624, Bocking, Braintree, Essex, England d. 2 Apr 1655, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts (Age 31 years)
  Marriage	Between 1647 and 1649	Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts   [4]
  Children	+ 1. Rev. William Adams,   b. 27 May 1650, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts d. 17 Aug 1685, Dedham, Norfolk, Massachusetts (Age 35 years)
  Family ID	F12654	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	26 Sep 2017

  
  

• Notes

  He came to New England in 1635 on the William and Anne. In volume 1 of The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635 (1999), page 13, Robert Charles Anderson notes that “Savage suggests that this passenger was son of William Adams of Ipswich, but this seems only a guess.” But later, in his Great Migration Directory (2015), Anderson says that Robert Strong's 2009 article “Two Seventeenth-Century Conversion Narratives from Ipswich” “connects, corrects, and amplifies” the Great Migration sketches of the two William Adamses, and acknowledges that this William Adams was the son of William Adams of Ipswich. “Housed in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) are two unusual, perhaps unique, seventeenth-century religious narratives: one by William Adams, and the other by his wife, Elisabeth. As a poet, I was particularly drawn to the narratives’ vivid relation of the Adamses’ struggles to surmount the challenges, both spiritual and material, that they encountered in the New World, struggles so intense that at one point William fears that he might ‘cut the throat of my own soul.’ To date, the most thoroughgoing primary source for seventeenth-century lay religious narratives is the series of ‘confessions’ recorded by minister Thomas Shepard. Until now, the Adams narratives have been available only to those few scholars who possess the expertise to dissect the manuscripts’ crabbed texts. So that readers with interests as diverse as religious history, social history, literary history, and poetics may explore the extraordinary and distinctive riches that lay within these early American autobiographies, I offer them to the public, with the gracious permission of the MHS, in their first printed edition.” [--Robert Strong, beginning his introduction to "Two Seventeenth-Century Conversion Narratives from Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony,” New England Quarterly 82:136, March 2009.]

  
  

• Sources

  [S1738] Lineage from Gov. William Bradford down to Sybil Chapin, by Howard Hurtig Metcalfe. [S1739] Mayflower Increasings: From the Files of George Ernest Bowman at the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants by Susan E. Roser. 2nd edition. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1995. [S2252] Mayflower Families Through Five Generations: Volume 22, William Bradford by Robert S. Wakefield and Ann Smith Lainhart. Plymouth, Massachusetts: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2004. [S1863] Robert Strong, "Two Seventeenth-Century Conversion Narratives from Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony." New England Quarterly 82:136, Mar 2009. [S101] The Great Migration Begins: Immigrants to New England, 1620-1633, Volumes 1-3 and The Great Migration: Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volumes 1-7, by Robert Charles Anderson. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1996-2011. [S1559] Autobiography of William Seymour Tyler, With a Genealogy of the Ancestors of Prof. and Mrs. William S. Tyler, prepared by Cornelius B. Tyler. 1912.