Genealogical notes of Barnstable families - citizen hylbom blog

34 GENEALOGICAL NOTES OF BAKNSTABLE FAMILIES.
erected to her memory, which has now crumbled to pieces. The
inscription has however been preserved.
HERE LYETH Ye
BODY OF Ye TRULY
virtuous and praiseworthy
mrs. mary
hinchCey, wife to
Mr. THOMAS HINCKLEY,
DIED JULY Ye 29, 1703,
IN Ye 73d YEAR OF
HER AGE.
Gov. Thomas Hinckley died April 25, 1705, aged 87, not 85,
as stated on the monument recently erected to his memory.
Mr. Moore, in his Lives of the Governors of Plymouth and
Massachusetts, has furnished the most extended notice of Gov.
Thomas Hinckley that has been published. He obtains his facts
mainly from the colonial records, consequently it is little more
than a synopsis of his official acts. In relation to his individual
history, he furnishes little information and of that little, much is
wanting in accuracy.
I confess that I do not feel competent to write, as it should
be written, the biography of Gov. Thomas Hinckley. I may
however attempt it in an article separate from this genealogy. I
can collect the facts, and lay a foundation on which another can
build. During half a century he held offices of trust and power
in the Old Colony, and had a controling influence over the popular
mind. He was the architect of his own fortune in life ; the
builder of his own reputation. He was a man of good common
sense, and of sound judgment ; honest and honorable in all his
dealings ; industrious, persevering and self-reliant ; and, if it be
any praise, it may be added, he was the best read lawyer in the
Colony. He had some enemies—it would have been a miracle if
so prominent and so independent a man had had none. Barren
trees are not pelted. The Quaker influence was arrayed in hostil-
ity to him. He examined every question presented to him in its
legal aspects, and viewing his acts from that stand-point, he was
very rarely in the wrong. He was a rigid independent in religion,
and his tolerant opinions, though in advance of his times, did
not come up to the standard of the present. Some of his acts I
shall leave for others to defend ; but that he was the intolerant
and cruel man that some of the infatuated bigots of his time represented
him to be, the facts will not sustain. He was a living
man, never allowed his faculties to rust by inaction, and to the
last could draft an instrument with as much clearness and precision
as in his early manhood.
Children of Gov. Thomas Hinckley born in Barnstable
13. I. Mary, 3d Aug. 1644, baptized Aug. 4, 1644. She mar-