Robert Abell (1605-1663)

Traveled from his home to New England in 1630 as part of the first wave of a mass exodus of Puritans called the Great Migration.

Very extensive ancestry documented.

Vital Statistics:
Robert was the second son of George Abell (1561-1630) and Frances Cotton (1573-1646). On his mother’s side, he was descended from a long line of English, and French aristocrats and royalty

was born in about 1605 in, ,

1663-June-20 : died at, on 20 June 1663.

Biography
For more info see his bio at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Abell

Robert Abell’s first recorded act in America (19 October 1630) was to apply to be a freeman in the recently founded village of Weymouth. On 18 May 1631, he took the freeman’s oath. “This act endowed him with full privileges and responsibilities of citizenship in the new colony, including ownership of lands, in the exercise of which he continued to acquire holdings.”

Most of the early settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony had at least two major preoccupations: (1) helping build Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill,” a model Christian society, and (2) surviving and prospering in the New World. It is not known exactly how committed Abell was to the first objective, but municipal and court records show him participating in the life of his community, slowly building up his land holdings and eventual establishing a business.

During his time as a resident of Weymouth (1630-1643), his civic duties included serving on various types of juries (grand, petit and coroner’s), and records indicate that he accumulated a small amount of land (about 7 acres). Like many immigrants, Robert Abell did not stay indefinitely in the first place he landed. In 1643, when the opportunity to join a newly founded town presented itself, he followed Reverend Samuel Newman (and the majority of his congregation) to a place the local Wampanoag tribe called Seekonk (a portion of which was later renamed “Rehoboth”). Some of Abell’s activities while living there can be found in the following extracts from the minutes of various Rehoboth town meetings and Plymouth colonial records.