Ursula Adams^[1]

1619 - 1679  (59 years)

• Name	Ursula Adams
  Birth	19 Jul 1619	Barton St David, Somerset, England
  Gender	Female
  Arrival	1638	, , Massachusetts, USA   [2]
  Name	Robinson
  Death	20 Feb 1679	Charleston, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA
  Person ID	I32736	Master
  Last Modified	31 Aug 2018

  
  

  Father	Henry Adams,   b. 21 Jan 1583, Barton St David, Somerset, England d. 6 Oct 1646, Braintree, Norfolk, Massachusetts, USA (Age 63 years)
  Mother	Edith Elizabeth Rosamund Squire,   b. 29 May 1587, Charlton, Mackrell, Somerset, England d. 21 Jan 1672, Medfield, Norfolk, Massachusetts, USA (Age 84 years)
  Marriage	19 Oct 1609	Charlton, Mackrell, Somerset, England   [3]
  Family ID	F7996	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family 1	Stephen P Streeter,   b. 9 Jan 1600, Goudhurst, Kent, England d. 14 Jul 1652, Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA (Age 52 years)
  Marriage	5 Oct 1640	Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA   [4]
  Children	1. Stephen Streeter,   b. 9 Dec 1641, Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA d. 19 Feb 1689, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA (Age 47 years)  [Father: natural]   2. Sarah Streeter,   b. 2 Apr 1643, Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA d. 30 Nov 1703, Watertown, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA (Age 60 years)  [Father: natural]   3. Hannah Streeter,   b. 10 Nov 1644, Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA d. 7 Apr 1689 (Age 44 years)  [Father: natural] + 4. Samuel Streeter,   b. 16 Jun 1647, Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA d. 31 May 1694, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA (Age 46 years)  [Father: natural]   5. Rebecca Streeter,   b. 4 Jun 1649, , , Massachusetts, USA d. 1 Oct 1719 (Age 70 years)  [Father: natural]   6. John Streeter,   b. 21 Sep 1651, Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA d. 1 Sep 1746, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA (Age 94 years)  [Father: natural]   7. Mary Streeter,   b. 27 Dec 1652, Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA d. 9 Feb 1726, , , Massachusetts, USA (Age 73 years)  [Father: natural]
  Family ID	F7994	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	10 Aug 2018

  
  

  Family 2	Samuel Hosier,   b. 1 Jun 1614, , , , England d. 29 Jul 1665, Watertown, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA (Age 51 years)
  Marriage	13 Oct 1657	Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA   [5]
  Children	1. Sarah Hosier,   b. 1658, Barton St David, Somerset, England d. Watertown, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA  [Father: natural]   2. Elizabeth Hosier,   b. 1660, Watertown, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA d. 21 Mar 1709, Watertown, Middlesex, Massachusetts, USA (Age 49 years)  [Father: natural]
  Family ID	F7997	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	10 Aug 2018

  
  

  Family 3	William Robinson,   b. 9 Jan 1614, St Dunstans, Canterbury, Kent, England d. 5 Jun 1668, Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA (Age 54 years)
  Marriage	21 Aug 1666	Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA
  Family ID	F7999	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	10 Aug 2018

  
  

  Family 4	Griffin Craft,   b. 9 Jan 1615   d. 21 Aug 1690 (Age 75 years)
  Marriage	15 May 1673	Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA   [6]
  Family ID	F7998	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	10 Aug 2018

  
  

• Event Map		Birth - 19 Jul 1619 - Barton St David, Somerset, England Arrival - 1638 - , , Massachusetts, USA Marriage - 5 Oct 1640 - Gloucester, Essex, Massachusetts, USA Marriage - 13 Oct 1657 - Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA Marriage - 21 Aug 1666 - Charlestown, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA Marriage - 15 May 1673 - Dorchester, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA Death - 20 Feb 1679 - Charleston, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA  = Link to Google Earth
  Pin Legend	: Address       : Location       : City/Town       : County/Shire       : State/Province       : Country       : Not Set

  
  

• Notes

  Ursula Adams Ursula was the beloved daughter of Henry Adams, said to be "the immigrant ancestor of the Adams family which has given to the United Sates two Presidents, a minister to Great Britain" and respected theologians in the early, religiously orthodox days of the Massachusetts Colony.1 She was the fifth child of nine and the only daughter of Henry and Edith (Squire) Adams, born July 19, 1619, in Somerset, England, near the southwest England Bristol Channel, just south of Wales. She was nineteen, and her youngest brother barely nine years old when Henry Adams gathered his family and sailed for the New World on one of the probably nine ships from England that braved the north Atlantic in 1638. They arrived in a year that beset the colonists with the most extreme weather Massachusetts can offer up, as recorded by Governor John Winthrop: "The spring of 1638 was so cold in New England that the settlers were forced to plant corn two to three times, for it rotted in the ground. This was followed by a warm summer and two tempestuous storms (hurricanes), the first August 3rd and the second on the 25th of September. The rains continued throughout the autumn and a considerable amount of snow arrived in October."2 The first concern of those early settlers was procuring food. Captain Roger Clapp came ashore at what was to become Watertown in May, 1630, and remembered that "the then un-subdued wilderness yielded little food." Writing of the years up to 1640, Clapp observed, "Fish was a good help to me and others. Bread was so very scarce, that sometimes I thought the very crusts of my father’s table [in England] would have been very sweet unto me. And when I could have [corn]meal and water and salt boiled together, it was so good, who could wish better?"3 By the time Henry Adams' family settled south of Boston in Braintree, property lines had been established and substantial houses built in the several settlements that had sprung up within a few miles of the rocky coast. The Cambridge of 1638 was " but a little village, scarcely 300 yards from north to south and 400 yards from east to west on the northerly bank of the Charles River, three miles west of Boston. Its area was divided by four short streets parallel to the river, crossed from north to south by four others. Within the area were forty or fifty unpainted wooden houses with shingled roofs. A little church of hand-hewn logs, stood near the center of the village. Extending eastward from Harvard Square in what is now Massachusetts Avenue was a row of houses which formed the northerly limit of the town."4 That Ursula was a favorite is marked by the fact that, upon her father's death in 1646, Henry's only daughter was remembered with a bequest of land "in the Neck ... during the terme I was to enjoy it, until returne into the towne's hand againe from whom I had it" even though she was the married mother of three children living with her husband in Charlestown at the time.5 Stephen Streeter arrived in Massachusetts Colony from Kent, England, in the same year that Ursula and her family had landed. Stephen and Ursula were married in 1640, two years later. He was at least the third generation of Streeter tradesmen employed as shoemakers. As did his colonial neighbors, Stephen also farmed. He is noted as a "freeman,"6 a distinction of citizenship that as few as 1 in 10 of the colony's inhabitants were qualified to enjoy.7 To be recorded as a freeman by the General Court, one had to be a mature male church-member, and must have experienced a transforming spiritual awakening by God's grace as attested by the applicant himself and confirmed by church leaders.8 Taking the oath as a freeman allowed one to vote in the affairs of the community in meetings generally held at the village church and, through his local meeting, be represented at convening of the council of the Colony. By this rigorous qualification and the stringency of the oath — oath-taking being a serious matter upon which one's salvation hinged — the church fathers sought orderly governance as well as maintained their influence upon the more temporal concerns of the colony. Stephen Streeter died after twelve years of marriage and after giving Ursula seven children. Mary, Ursula's youngest child, was born after the death of her father, and one presumes that the young widow had to rely upon her brothers and neighbors following her husband's death for help with the farm, while she looked to providing for the increase of her estate. Half of Stephen's Charlestown homestead was willed to his son, Stephen, inheriting at the age of 12, and presumably the balance remained to the benefit of his wife, who was about to turn 33 years old at the time of her first husband's death. The sum of Stephen's worldly goods was carefully enumerated by his friends and neighbors Samuel Cartar and Robert Cutler to include his leather-working lasts, lead and hammer, and his household goods comprised of a "little feather bed, coverlet, bolster and pillow, a pewter item, curtains, three bedsteads with six bed sheets, an iron pot and a kettle, skillet and 'a skomer', pot hangers in the fireplace, a fire shovel and tongs with gridiron, twenty pounds of yarn and five keys with matching locks, a Bible and sundry lumber" whose estimated worth was £6.6, locally, by my reckoning.9 Miss Adams became a woman of ample means by virtue of her hale constitution: she was married no less than four times, inheriting properties in towns separated by tracks winding through forest whose control by the aboriginal Indians made distances of a couple of hour's walk quite distinct from one another — Watertown from Cambridge, Cambridge to Roxbury, for example10 — and to walk from one to the other was to chance grievous harm. Nonetheless, after Stephen died, the combination of domestic husbandry, physical need and emotional want caused widowers of the Colony to hazard the distance to court her, and from her first three husbands, the third of which, the unfortunate Mr William Robinson, for example, she gained his "dwelling house, orchard, meadow, hempyard, that part of the new barn and old barn I now enjoy, stable, cow yard, one-half the pasture, [nine] acres salt marsh by the river, and half the fresh meadow by Thomas Trott's and all the planting ground near his house being [eleven] acres." 11 By 1668, the year of the hapless Mr Robinson's untimely death, the property lines of Watertown were well established and recorded, as were those of the other communities of the Anglo pioneers on Massachusetts' shores, as can be discerned from the exactitude of Dr. Henry Bond's graphic record: 1600s Watertown, Massachusetts While widowed, before marrying Griffin Crafts, Ursula sold Watertown holdings consisting of "a dwelling house and 130 acres of land" (presumably Robinson's estate) on June 27, 1671.12 Ursula made Griffin Crafts a widower March 26, 1673, dying at the relatively young age of 53, having labored with steadfast perseverance to establish an unshakable legacy for her new nation. NOTES: 1. Streeter, Milton B., The Streeter Family of Goudherst, Kent, England, and Lynn, Massachusetts; Eben Putnam, Publisher, Boston, 1896, 1929. 2. Daniels, ___, "Generation I - Robert Daniell", http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~danielsofmassachusettsbaycolony/gen1.html - 2003.07.13 3. Clapp, Capt. Roger, Memoir, redacted by John Beardsley, The Winthrop Society, www.winthrop society.org/ doc_clapp.php, 2003.07.13 4. Norton, Arthur O., History of Massachusetts, 1927, quoted by Daniels, op. cit. 5. Streeter, op. cit. 6. Savage, James, A Genealogical Dictionary of th First Settlers of New England..., Genealogical Publishing Co., Baltimore, 1965. 7. Daniels, op. cit. 8. Stewart, Marcia, "The Freemen of Massachusetts Bay, 1630 - 1636," www.winthropsociety.org, The Winthrop Society, 2003.07.13. 9. Streeter, op. cit. 10. Hubbard, William, Map, 1677. 11. Streeter, op. cit. 12. Streeter, op. cit. http://roger.templeton.net/Adams_Ursula_%28Streeter%29.html Ursula is reported to be the 3rd grandmother of Eli Whitney and the 7th grandmother of Percival Lowell (http://www.radix.net/~huston/familyweb/Henry__Adams.html). She was the fifth child of nine of Henry and Edith (Squire) Adams, born July 19, 1619, in Somerset, England, near the southwest England Bristol Channel, just south of Wales. She was nineteen, and her youngest brother barely nine years old when Henry Adams gathered his family and sailed for the New World on one of the probably nine ships from England that braved the north Atlantic in 1638. She married a total of four times, surviving all of them, including Stephen Streeter, Samuel Hosier, William Robinson and Griffin Crafts. She married Stephen Streeter in 1640 and were married for twelve years. They had seven children together, including one born after his death. "Urslin Streeter," widow of Stephen Streeter married Samuel Hosier in Charlestown 13 October 1657. They had no children. She married William Robinson, who died an untimely death in 1668 and married Griffin Crafts married in Dorchester, 15 July 1673. Ursula died 20 February 1679. Several dates for vital events in this family are reportedly found in a Streeter family Bible. In that record the death date for Griffin Crafts is given as 21 August 1690, whereas his death date from his inventory was given as 4 October 1689, and the inventory was taken on 27 November 1689, so the 1690 date must be wrong. The death date for Ursula Adams is recorded in the Bible as 20 February 1649, which is wrong by decades, and the year of death of 1679 is an editorial suggestion. (The original author notes that when the date of a vital event is found only in this Bible, then, it should be treated with some skepticism). From http://roger.templeton.net/Adams_Ursula_(Streeter).html and other sources. Parents: Henry Adams (1583 - 1646) Edith Rosamund Squire Fussell (1587 - 1672) Spouses: William Robinson (1614 - 1668) Griffin Craft (1600 - 1689) Stephen P Streeter (1600 - 1652)* Samuel Hosier (1610 - 1665)* Children: John Streeter (1640 - ____)* Stephen Streeter (1641 - 1689)* Sarah Streeter Gleason (1643 - 1703)* Siblings: Henry Adams (1609 - 1676)* Thomas Adams (1612 - 1688)* Jonathan Adams (1614 - 1690)* Samuel Henry Adams (1617 - 1689)* Ursula Adams Crafts (1619 - 1679) John Adams (1622 - 1706)* Mary Adams Fairbanks (1625 - 1711)* Joseph Adams (1626 - 1694)* Edward Adams (1629 - 1716)*

  
  

• Sources

  [S761] Yates Publishing, Ancestry Family Trees, (Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members.), Ancestry Family Tree. http://trees.ancestry.com/pt/AMTCitationRedir.aspx?tid=152362159&pid=35 [S747] Ancestry.com, U.S. and Canada, Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, 1500s-1900s, (Ancestry.com Operations, Inc), Place: New England; Year: 1638; Page Number: 117. [S1092] Ancestry.com, Somerset, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1531-1812, (Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.). [S815] Ancestry.com, U.S., New England Marriages Prior to 1700, (Ancestry.com Operations Inc), Genealogical Publishing Co.; Baltimore, MD, USA; Volume Title: New England Marriages Prior to 1700. [S102] Dodd, Jordan, Liahona Research, comp., Massachusetts, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1633-1850, (Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2005.). [S228] Ancestry.com, American Marriages Before 1699, (Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1997).