John Field

- 1686

• Name	John Field  [1]
  Gender	Male
  Death	1686	Providence, Providence, Rhode Island   [2]
  Person ID	I43592	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	28 Sep 2025

  
  

  Family
  Children	+ 1. Hannah Field   d. Aft 1708
  Family ID	F25466	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	28 Sep 2025

  
  

• Notes

  He first appears in Providence in 1638. His origins are unknown, but he was probably from St. Albans, Hertfordshire. As Ian Watson narrates in his "The Dating of the Providence Civil Contract" (The American Genealogist 91:261, Jul/Oct 2020, published Dec 2021), "In 1897 Edward Field reported that during conservation work on the Providence town records, a pasted-in page was removed, and on its back side a partial draft of a document was discovered in the handwriting of Providence town clerk Thomas Olney, showing that John Field was the brother of 'James Field of St. Albans in Hartfordshire'. […] This compelling evidence of a Hertfordshire birth contradicts the origin at Thurnscoe, Yorkshire, suggested for John and William Field by Frederick Clifton Pierce in his 1901 Field Genealogy." Olney himself was from Hertfordshire and appears to have been at the center of a network of Rhode Island families from there.

  
  

• Sources

  [S8653] "Louis Clark Mathewson." The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 106:148, 1952. [S679] The Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island by John Osborne Austin. Albany, New York; 1887. Corrected edition, including corrections by John Osborne Austin and material by G. Andrews Moriarty from The American Genealogist. Baltimore: Genealogicical Publishing Co., 1969, 1978.