Capt. Richard Betts

1613 - 1713  (100 years)

• Name	Richard Betts  [1, 2, 3]
  Prefix	Capt.
  Birth	1613	Hertfordshire, England   [4]
  Gender	Male
  Death	18 Nov 1713	Newtown, Long Island, New York   [5, 6, 7]
  Burial	20 Nov 1713  [8]
  Person ID	I22582	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	22 Nov 2020

  
  

  Family	Joanna Chamberlain,   b. Oct 1630, Strood, Medway, Kent, England d. Aft 16 Mar 1711, Newtown, Long Island, New York (Age ~ 81 years)
  Children	1. Mary Betts,   b. 14 May 1654, Newtown, Long Island, New York d. 14 May 1734, Mattituck, Suffolk, Long Island, New York (Age 80 years)
  Family ID	F13590	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	25 Apr 2024

  
  

• Notes

  Said to have come from Hemel Hempstead in Herefordshire. Said to have brought his own tombstone from England and dig his own grave, into which he went at the age of 100. Janet and Robert Wolfe's collection of notes on Richard Betts provides a thorough collection of his and his wife's appearances in the record. He appears first in Newtown, Long Island in 1656. He was a justice in Long Island in 1669, and High Sheriff of Yorkshire, Long Island in 1679 and 1680. (Yorkshire was an administrative unit that existed for a few years following the English conquest of New Amsterdam; it comprised the territory of present day Long Island, including modern Brooklyn and Queens, plus Staten Island, and also the modern Bronx, Westchester, and Nassau counties. Like the original Yorkshire, it was divided into three "ridings", East, West, and North.) On 13 May 1693, Richard Betts of Newtown and his wife Joanna sold 20 acres of land in Newtown to John Scudder. Joanna's mother's first husband was a John Scudder, who died in England in 1625 or 1626; it seems not unlikely that this John Scudder was a relative. In an August, 1698 census of Newtown (transcribed by Charles Carroll Gardner in The American Genealogist 24:133, July 1948), Richard Betts senior appears as an inhabitant with a family of 4 plus 1 Negro. His burial record (citation details below) gives his age at death as a highly believable 113 and says that he was buried at "ye kills."

  
  

• Sources

  [S506] Jane Fletcher Fiske, "A New England Immigrant Kinship Network: Notes on the English Origins of the Scudders of Salem and Barnstable, Massachusetts, Bridget (-----) (Verry) Giles of Salem, and Joanna (Chamberlain) Betts of Long Island." The American Genealogist 72:285, July/October 1997. [S2767] Genealogy of the Swasey Family by Benjamin Franklin Swasey. Cleveland: Ambrose Swasey, 1910. [S2762] Alice D. Serrell, "Descendants of Christopher and Sarah Davis Swayze." Detroit Society for Genealogical Research Magazine 18:3, Oct 1954; 18:73, Feb 1955; 18:99, Apr 1955; 18:127, Jun 1955. [S399] The Settlers of the Beekman Patent by Frank J. Doherty. Ongoing multivolume series begun in 1990. [S2769] John Blythe Dobson, "William Holden, Patrick Swayze, and Tom Hulce: Their Cousinship with Jean Margaret (Kennedy) Mitchelson through the Betts Family.", year and place only. [S468] A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England by James Savage. Boston: Little, Brown, 1860-64. [S4451] John Blythe Dobson, "Chamberlaynes in the Ancestry of the Betts Family of Newtown, Long Island." The American Genealogist 82:227, 2007., place only. [S3834] Record Kept by Rev. Thomas Poyer, Rector of Episcopal Churches at Jamaica, Newtown & Flushing, Long Island, copied in the early 1860s by Henry Onkerdonk, Jr., and typed from Onkerdonk's manuscript by Josephine C. Frost. Brooklyn, New York, 1913.