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

1 66 Appendix
The Parish Registers of St. Nicholas, Harwich, abound with entries con-
cerning the families of Blosse, Borflete, Cooper, Herde and Hewett, from
1559 t0 I ^3° ar,d onward I have notes ; of more than one hundred of these ;
some among them presumably belong to descendants of daughters men-
tioned on pages 40, 41, etc., and a few have been given in the text, but it
has not been thought advisable to print the others, as the identity and
indeed the connection of most of them with those of the same name in
the families which intermarried, as we know, with the Marvins of Harwich
and vicinity, is altogether uncertain.
The first entries on the oldest Parish Registers extant are very incom-
plete ; the law requiring the Clergy to keep these records came into effect
but slowly, for the " clerks" were not always ready penmen in those days.
Even where there was a willingness to comply with such requirements, the
suppression of religious houses and the consequent and frequent changes
in Parish priests which preceded the death of Henry VIII — changes which
especially marked the reigns of his immediate successors — and the sharp
divisions among the followers of one or the other party in the Church,
who refused to receive her sacraments from ministers with whose creed
they could not agree, sufficiently explain the deficiencies. This is particu-
larly true of Harwich at the period under notice, when the Parishes of St.
Nicholas and its mother Church at Dovercourt were full of trouble. (See
P- 54-)
A single example will show how difficult it is to determine the identity
of persons named in those old records, with the little light we now pos-
sess. The Will of a Margaret Cooper, alluded to on page 41, names her
son Roger, her daughter Christian, who married Haines, and a son
and grandson Thomas (Christian names frequently occurring on the Har-
wich Register), but it also mentions several children not found on that
Register, and some who are there called children of John and Margaret
Cooper are not named in this Will. There may have been more than one
John Cooper who had a wife Margaret, contemporary with the one named
below, and there are other possible explanations which it is needless to
1 '
suggest. It is hardly probable that this Margaret was the " Aunte Cooper
of John Marvin (31), but I venture, even with this uncertainty, to print
the substance of the Will, for several of the names it contains are the same
with those of persons in Marvin Wills, etc., whom I have been unable to
identify.