The English ancestry of Reinold and Matthew Marvin of Hartford, Ct ...

Reinold and Matthew Marvin 161
the East Norwalk station. The late Rev. Dr. Nathaniel
Bouton, a descendant, in his Historical Sermon on the Two
Hundredth Anniversary of the settlement, says this lot was
one of the most desirable in the town, and observes : "The
name of Matthew Marvin is inscribed on almost every page
of Norwalk's early history. He was a puritan by blood ....
Devout, discreet, calm, sound in judgment, he gained and
held the confidence of his fellow citizens, and discharged
for them many offices of civil life." The frequent use of the
title "Mr." on the Records, and the value of his estate, con-
firm this estimate of the man. He was a Deputy to the
Colonial Legislature in 1654, probably the first to represent
the town of Norwalk, and served again in the higher body
as "Assistant," in 1659.
While living in Hartford his wife Elizabeth died ; the
date has not been found, but it must have been between
1640 and 1646, and he married, secondly, about 1647, Mrs.
Alice, the widow of John Bouton, of Hartford, by whom he
had issue.*
* The facts and official documents from Fairfield Probate Records, on which this
statement is based, and which contradict the account given in the " Bouton-Boughton
Family," have been discovered since the publication of my monograph in " Family
Histories and Genealogies," in which 1 followed earlier authorities, who believed the
second wife was Mrs. Alice Kellogg. These data have been printed in full in the N.
E. Hist, and Gen. Register for July, 1897, and need not be repeated here.
The Boutons are said by family tradition to have been a Huguenot family, but I have
found nothing of value to sustain this or the fanciful stories concerning the noble
ancestry of John and the arms assigned the family in the volume cited, — matters which
I discussed in the Register. The name is found in Essex and Suffolk more than a
century before the emigration to New England, and a half century before the persecu-
tion in France. I think it highly probable that John Bouton, Jr., who married Mat-