The Wood Family: Six Children in Eight Days, A Tragedy of Shakespearean Proportion

Hypotheses and unproven claims have long swirled around the origins of John Wood of Portsmouth, sometimes called John Wood the Mariner even though no evidence shows he was a seaman. 

He has been identified as the John Wood who married Margaret Carter at St. Savior’s Church in Southwark, London, and lived in Frying Pan Alley. He has also been linked with John Winthrop and described as a master’s mate or captain in one of the fleets that brought English settlers to New England. None of these identifications is supported by direct evidence.

Part of the confusion arises from several John Woods in seventeenth-century New England. Over time, the identities of different men have contaminated each other.

More recent research has disproved some of those connections and failed to substantiate others. What can be said about our John Wood, born about 1590 somewhere in England, and immigrated to Rhode Island, is that his life before 1643 remains largely a historical blank slate.

John Wood of Portsmouth

The first documented appearance of John Wood of Portsmouth (ca. 1590-1655) comes on June 7, 1643, when John Richman and David Greenman brought separate trespass suits against him in a Newport court. Both matters were referred to an arbitrator rather than decided in court, and the surviving entries tell nothing about the disputes.

John was affluent enough when he arrived in Rhode Island that he was able to buy land in 1646 in the area that became Middletown, a family farm that has remained in the Wood family for generations.

His son, John Wood II, lived on the Middletown farm while John Sr. moved farther north to Portsmouth. He was accepted as a freeman in July 1648 and served on the Portsmouth Town Council in 1649. The father is often referred to as John Wood of Portsmouth to distinguish him from his son known as John Wood of Middletown.

By the time John Sr. appeared in Rhode Island records, he already had at least five older children born in England who were either grown or approaching adulthood.  His oldest son, George, was probably born before 1620 and the last of the England births was around 1638. The 1655 Portsmouth estate settlement and local gravestones provide proof five of his children were born in England and traveled to Rhode Island. 

The identity of their mother is unknown. She either died in England or soon after arrival as he married a second wife, Elizabeth, whose maiden name is also unknown. His two youngest daughters, Susanna and Elizabeth, were both under sixteen when he died and may have been children of this second marriage.

When John died intestate in 1655, dispersal of his estate was a mess and immediately became complicated. His family included adult children from his first marriage, a widow, and two underage daughters.

The Portsmouth Town Council stepped in to inventory the property and determine how it should be divided. A group of prominent men, including our direct ancestor Thomas Cornell, appraised the land, buildings, fences, livestock, and household goods - pretty much everything. The family accepted an agreement for distribution of assets in May. John II was allowed to keep the land already in his possession, but had to pay his sister Margaret eight pounds and a “ewe goat.”

John of Portsmouth and his unidentified first wife are our eleventh-great-grandparents.

John Wood of Middletown

Before his father’s death, John Wood II (ca. 1620-1704) had informally taken possession of approximately fifty-eight acres in the area that later became Middletown, and the Portsmouth Council allowed this in the final agreement.

While several other siblings eventually moved away from Portsmouth, John remained on the farm for the rest of his life, safely removed from the family drama.

The details of John’s marriages remain uncertain. He apparently married an unidentified wife in England and perhaps a second wife and had two children before arrival in the colonies with his father. He married again to Mary Peabody about 1662 and they had several children, including our grandfather ancestor, John Wood III, of Little Compton.

Mary Peabody, born around 1640, was a daughter of John Peabody of Newport who bought property in 1649. A carpenter by trade, he was also highly entrepreneurial, owned cattle ,and had business interests spread across Little Compton and Dartmouth.  Mary’s mother is sometimes identified as Dorothy Tooley, but that identification is questionable and should not be treated as established.

John briefly entered  colonial politics, serving as a deputy to the Rhode Island General Assembly in 1673. In December 1677, John purchased two tracts at Saconett Neck, now Little Compton. One contained approximately one hundred acres along the water, between the property of Joseph Church and Josiah Cooke.. This land eventually served as the homestead for the next Wood generation.

John died on August 26, 1704 . His gravestone inscription, copied by historians around 1890, recorded both his dead date and his age as eight-four. Mary lived until 1719.Both are buried in the Wood Lot in Middletown.

.John Wood of Middletown and Mary Peabody are our tenth-great grandparents. 

Lt. John Wood of Little Compton

 Their son, Lt. John Wood (1664-1740),was born in Newport and moved between 1688 and 1691 to the 100-acre tract in Little Compton inherited from his father. 

John married Mary Church (1666-1748) in Hingham in 1688 and they had eleven children over the next nineteen years  

Mary’s father was Joseph Church (1638-1711), a descendant of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren. She was also a niece of Colonel Benjamin Church, one of the best-known military commanders in early New England.

 

Benjamin Church, Joseph's brother, was among the early proprietors of Little Compton and became John Wood’s neighbor when John moved to the town to claim his one-hundred acre of land deeded to him by his father. 

During King Phillip’s War, Church organized irregular, highly mobile forces that combined English colonists with Native allies and adapted Native methods of warfare. His forces participated in the campaign at Mount Hope in Rhode Island that tracked and killed the leader of the Native American resistance, Metacom, called King Philip by the British.

Church later led expeditions across the northeastern frontier of New England and Acadia during King William’s War and Queen Anne’s War, forerunners of American ranger-style warfare He was inducted into the U.S. Army Ranger Hall of Fame in 1992.

John Wood was commissioned as a Lieutenant n the Little Compton militia in the late 1690s, in charge of maintaining garrison defenses for the coastal areas.

The political identity of Little Compton changed several times over the next several decades. Originally part of Plymouth Colony, it became part the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in 1691. In 1747, a royal boundary settlement transferred it to the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. 

The Tragic Loss of Six Children

An epidemic swept through Little Compton in the winter of 1711-1712, causing twenty three deaths in the small farming community. The epicenter was recorded in Waterbury, Connecticut, where  hundreds of people died, including 24 members of the Connecticut General Assembly. but it spread quickly through coastal communities of Connecticut and southeastern Massachusetts. The epidemic was largely contained by the isolation of farming communities and natural quarantine when families were so sick they couldn’t leave their farms and those traveling through avoided houses of sickness.

The epidemic was caused by a highly contagious, virulent strain of influenza combined with secondary bacterial pneumonia that could cause death within a few days.

Six of John and Mary’s oldest seven children died within eight days of each other in March 1712 and were buried in four graves in the Little Compton cemetery.  The only one of the seven older children to survive was our ancestor, twenty-one-year-old Mary Wood.  Four younger children survived the epidemic, but eleven-year-old Rebekah died two years later.

Little Compton Church and Old Commons Burial Ground

John died in 1740 and Mary eight years later in 1748. They are buried at the Little Compton Old Commons Burial Ground alongside their six children who died in the epidemic.  Benjamin Church is also buried in the cemetery. 

In Memory of Lieu John Wood

Died February 22, 1739

In Ye 77 year of his age

In Memory of Mary Widow 

of Lieu John Wood

Died Nov ye 11 1748

Aged about 80 years

Janie and I visited the cemetery to pay our respects to the Wood family and the young children and look for Colonel Church’s grave near the church. When a young man came outside and struck up a conversation, I mentioned this was Benjamin Church’s grave. He immediately came to attention and saluted. An Army veteran, he well knew who Benjamin Church was. What he hadn’t known was that Church was buried in that cemetery.

John Wood of Compton and Mary Church are our ninth- great-grandparents.

Mary Wood and the Bailey Family

Four months after losing her siblings, Mary Wood (1691-1745) married Lt. Thomas Bailey (1690-1740). With that marriage, our Wood line merged into the Bailey family.  

Like his father-in-law, Thomas served as a commissioned officer in the local militia. He acquired and managed property in both Portsmouth and Little Compton, eventually coming to be described as the wealthiest man in town.

Thomas and Mary had ten children. The family’s military tradition continued with their son Thomas Bailey Jr. who served during the American Revolution. He was captured by the British and endured brutal captivity on an English prison ship.

John Woods will directly bequeathed money and high value household items to Mary rather than to her husband. The only surviving son of John and Mary’s eleven children inherited most of the family’s land.

Thomas Bailey died in 1740 at about age fifty. Mary survived him by five years, dying in 1745 at age fifty-four. Mary’s will shows she was a slave holder and bequeathed three of them to her children.  It is a sobering reminder that not only Southerners were slave owners, and some were in our ancestor families. 

Mary and Thomas were buried in Little Compton Old Commons Burial Ground near Mary's parents and the brothers and sisters she lost in 1712.

Inscription: In Memory of Mary, ye wife of

Lieu Thomas Bailey

Died October 7

1745 in ye 54 Year of her Age

Mary Wood and Thomas Bailey are our eighth great-grandparents. Thomas Bailey, Jr. is our seventh great-grandfather.