Richard Church

Abt 1600 - 1667  (~ 67 years)

• Name	Richard Church
  Birth	Abt 1600  [1]
  Gender	Male
  Death	16 Dec 1667	Hadley, Hampshire, Massachusetts   [1, 2]
  Person ID	I22345	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others | Ancestor of TWK
  Last Modified	14 Nov 2020

  
  

  Family	Anne,   b. Abt 1600   d. 10 Mar 1684, Hatfield, Hampshire, Massachusetts (Age ~ 84 years)
  Children	+ 1. Deacon Edward Church,   b. Abt 1628   d. 19 Sep 1704, Hatfield, Hampshire, Massachusetts (Age ~ 76 years)
  Family ID	F13491	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	2 Jan 2019

  
  

• Notes

  First appears at Hartford in 1637; he may have come with, or shortly after, the Rev. Hooker. He is said to have served in the Pequot War. His name is on the Founders Monument in downtown Hartford. He removed to Hadley in 1661. His origins are unknown. Taking advantage of this, the notorious genealogical fraudster Gustav Anjou (1863-1942), hired by Richard Church's descendant Charles Washburn Church, concocted an English ancestry for the Richard Church of Hartford, making him a son of Richard Church and Alice Vassell of Essex, with several further generations of ancestry behind them. As documented on the excellent WikiTree page for Richard Church, portions of Anjou's fabrications, including spurious birthdates for Richard and for his marriage, and a made-up father for his wife Anne, made it into not just Charles Washburn Church's 1914 Simeon Church of Chester, Connecticut, 1708-1792, and His Descendants, but also into Benjamin Tinkham Marshall's 1922 Modern History of New London County, Connecticut and, startlingly, the generally good genealogist Lucius Barbour's Families of Early Hartford, Connecticut.

  
  

• Sources

  [S387] Hale, House and Related Families, Mainly of the Connecticut River Valley by Donald Lines Jacobus and Edgar Francis Waterman. Hartford, Connecticut: Connecticut Historical Society, 1952. [S2519] Ancestry of Thomas Chalmers Brainerd by Dwight Brainerd, ed. Donald Lines Jacobus. Montreal, 1948.