JOHN DRAKE 10 great grandfather - The Great Migration Begins

JOHN DRAKE 18 October 1630: applied for freemanship [MBCR 1:80]. 26 May 1631: John Reading of the Inner Temple, London, to John Winthrop, writing about the will of Isaac Johnson: "You write you have sent it over, John Drake sayth he copied it to that purpose, but none can be heard of" [WP 3:37]. 13 March 1633/4: Bequest in will of Francis Drake of Esher, Surrey, to "John Drake, my Cozen William Drake's sonne, twenty poundes to be sent unto him into New England" [Waters 580-81]. COMMENTS: The John Drake of the third item above, and almost certainly of the other two, was son of William Drake of Wiscombe Park, Devonshire, a junior line of the prominent Drakes of Ashe of the same county. The letter of John Reading shows that a John Drake had recently been in New England, at or shortly after the death of Isaac Johnson (September 1630); this John Drake, then, would have been in New England at the time of requesting freemanship in October 1630, but gone by the time the first group of freemen were admitted in May 1631. Presumably he returned on the Lyon in March 1630/1. He may have returned to New England shortly thereafter, or Francis Drake may simply have lost track of his cousin at this time. In any case, he is not the John Drake who appears briefly in Taunton, Plymouth Colony, late in the 1630s, moves to Windsor, Connecticut, and dies there in 1659 [TAG 63:193-206, 65:87-88]. Douglas Richardson has discovered that John Drake of Windsor derived from Hampton in Arden, Warwickshire [Frederick L. Weis, Ancestral Roots ..., 7th edition (Baltimore 1992), p. 197]. The Great Migration Begins Sketches PRESERVED PURITAN Ancestral Chain: John DRAKE Immigrant b.1585 and Elizabeth ROGERS Immigrant b.1581, John DRAKE Immigrant b.1625, Mary DRAKE b.1666, Catherine MARSHALL b.1699, Catherine FOWLER b.1723, Lydia NOBLE b.1768, Horace Datus ENSIGN b.1797, Martin Luther ENSIGN b.1831, Harriett Camilla ENSIGN b.1859, George Ensign SMITH b.1898, Camilla SMITH b.1926, Lark, JR. John and Elizabeth ROGERS DRAKE are gr. gr. grandparents of Governor Oliver WOLCOTT signer of the Declaration of Independents.