Phineas Wolcott Cook Family Tree

ORIGINS No evidence Daniel was related to brothers Robert and Thomas Porter. However, they were in Farmington about the same time and stayed in the area together, so it is possible they were either brothers or were related. In "The Ancestors of Jermain and Louise Porter," by John Jermain Porter, Hagerstown, Md., 1940, it is claimed Daniel is a brother of Robert and Thomas, but not substantiated. No one has proof, and in fact naming patterns in Daniel's family are so different as to almost prove he was not related to the other two. Connecticut Porters traced on the website: (http://www.esthersscrapbook.com/ConnecticutPorters.htm(April 23, 2012) "1594 – Felstead, Essex,England        d. 1648 – Windsor, CT 1600 – Shalford, Essex, England       d.1647 – Windsor, CT Married: 18 Oct 1620, Messing, Essex, England 14 children; last 6 born in MA and CT (Robert was the third, so born in England) "Timewise, John of the first couple reaches clear back into the end of the 16th century. Roseanna was a “millennium baby,” born on July 13, half way through the year 1600 (at least one descendant, Nathan Hoppe, has that birth date, too). John and Roseanna lived in Essex, England, northeast of London near the sea. Roseanna (often called Anna) was also born in Essex but in a different town, and they married in yet another town. "We have a marriage date for them—October 18, 1620, and it enriches their story.Just three weeks and four days after their marriage, a wide ocean away from Essex, a ship named <i>Mayflower</i> dropped anchor in the northern reaches of what would soon be called the “New World.”Jamestown in Virginia had been settled thirteen years before, and the Dutch were already exploring the New York area. Had John and Roseanna, when they married, heard about any of that? Had the thought of crossing the vast sea themselves entered their minds? Whether or not it had, they couldn’t have known that they and generations of their descendants would end up living out their lives less than two hundred miles beyond where the <i>Mayflower</i> landed, in an area that would soon be called Connecticut. "Our next information is confusing. Some sources on Ancestry list John as arriving in Massachusetts in 1630, in Hingham MA [just outside Boston] in 1637, and in Connecticut in 1638. That would seem to make sense except that some Ancestry sources also report children born to the family <i>in England</i> in 1630, 1632, 1633, 1635, 1637, 1638. The family had 13 children in the space of 21 years, with a fourteenth born four years later, but at this point we can’t be sure how many were born before they crossed the ocean. "Eleven ships full of Puritans came over with the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 under the leadership of John Winthrop. If the 1630 date is correct for John and Roseanna, then they would have been part of that group. Can you imagine the courage of mother Roseanna in taking seven children under nine to be cooped up on a ship with two hundred other people for two months? (If they came later, those children would have been older, but there would have been more of them.) I found the name <i>Porter</i> in one of the passenger lists—possibly them, or maybe not; we’ve no way to be sure. "I had gotten this far in my write up when I went looking for a date for the founding of Windsor, Connecticut, since I knew John and Roseanna died there. I already knew Windsor was the first English settlement in Connecticut. I found more than I was looking for! I found several websites about a ship (Mary and John) that came over in 1630 and whose passengers founded the town of Windsor. I learned that these Porter ancestors of ours were a documented part of the founding of Windsor because I have seen John’s name on <i>two</i> Internet lists of founders! "Roseanna Porter died in Windsor on May 11, 1647. She was just 47, and her youngest child, Joseph, was three. Eleven months later, little Joseph died on April 20.Two days later John died. It sounds like a common illness, but we have no way of knowing. The youngest living child was 8, the oldest 17, and no other family members died at that time. Several of John and Anna’s children lived out their lives in Windsor and died there. One died in Woodbury, just south of Bethlehem, and two—including our ancestor Robert—died in Farmington."

ENGLAND "A puritan minister, who on account of his non-conformity, was ejected from the Established Church." (Some Descendants of Robert Porter, Farmington, Connecticut, 1640, Margaret Porter Miller, FHL book 929.273 P835m, p. 1.)