William Adams

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate death: 18 Jan 1659, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts

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.]

William married Elizabeth Stacy between 1647 and 1649 in Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts. Elizabeth (daughter of Simon Stacy and Elizabeth Clarke) was born in 1624 in Bocking, Braintree, Essex, England; died on 2 Apr 1655 in Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

1. Rev. William Adams was born on 27 May 1650 in Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts; died on 17 Aug 1685 in Dedham, Norfolk, Massachusetts.

Other Events and Attributes:

• Alternate death: 1661
• Alternate death: Bef 1662, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts

Notes:

First seen in Cambridge in 1635, then removed to Ipswich.

William married (Unknown wife of William Adams). (Unknown died in 1681 in Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]