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

Reinold and Matthew Marvin 19
St. Nicholas at Harwich, and to obtain copies of several
Wills made by residents there. As the result of a recent
visit to Ipswich, following the Harwich clue, an abstract of
a very early Will recorded there has been obtained, which
the officials declined to copy, as it was written in the old
ecclesiastical Latin, very much abbreviated ; with this we
also secured copies of four other Wills from the same
Record, which are given below. So far as we have been
able to discover, these five Wills are all that are to be found
recorded there, which were made by the Marvins who lived
in Ipswich before our ancestors left the mother country.*
The conclusions drawn from these Wills and those pre-
served at Somerset House, London, will be given on sub-
sequent pages as they are taken up in turn. It is only
necessary to say here that it is evident from these various
sources that the Marvins of Essex were possessed of goodly
estates for the time, holding not alone the houses where they
resided, and the lands adjoining them which they cultivated,
but were also the owners of other estates in various Parishes
more or less remote, which they leased to tenants, and some
of these, both free and copy-hold, were held by several
generations of descendants.
These Wills, with one or two exceptions, will be given in
full, from careful copies of the originals ; for I have thought
that their quaint expressions, the bequests of their makers,
and the names of their estates and tenants, their friends and
* My thanks are due to Miss Emma M. Walford, of London, for her aid in obtain-
ing these copies.