A Fresh Start - 52 Ancestors #1

Amy Johnson Crow is restarting her 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge for the New Year. This time she will provide some prompts for blog ideas. I will start off trying to use the prompts but if it becomes too burdensome to find an ancestor who fits, I'll venture off on my own tangent. I know the 52 in 52 aspect got me really back into blogging when I was flagging a bit last year. I finished with the same number of posts as the previous two years.

So prompt #1 is called "Fresh Start" and it took me a bit to find my inspiration. I actually had the next three prompts all written before this one...

"Three studies of fishermen" by William Henry Pyne,
Royal Museums Greenwich is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I settled on Nicholas Edgecomb, an early Maine settler and my 9th great-grandfather. Nicholas came to about 1638 to Richmond Island as a fisherman in the employ of Mr. Robert Trelawney. Mr. Trelawney was a merchant from Plymouth, England. Nicholas appears on the books of Mr. Trelawney off and on for the next several years. In 1640 he is found living at Blue Point on the patent of Mr. Thomas Lewis and Capt. Richard Bonython in the area now known as Scarborough, and by 1660  he had moved to Saco. Later his son, Robert, would marry the granddaughter of the patent holder, Thomas Lewis.


Nicholas Edgecomb's wife, Wilmot Randall, also had a fresh start in a new country. She came from England to work as a maid for Mistress Trelawney. In fact, she was in Maine less than a year before she married Nicholas and he had to repay her contract to the Trelawneys. According to records summarized by Walter Goodwin Davis, he paid a little over 6 pounds to the Trelawneys on her behalf.

Although they lived very modestly, Nicholas & Wilmot (Randall) Edgecomb made a fresh start and secured a life for themselves and their children on the Maine frontier. During King Philip's War all of his sons served in the garrison at Black Point (later combined with Blue Point to become Scarborough). His great-grandson, Gibbins Edgecomb served in three campaigns in the Revolutionary War at Falmouth, Maine (1776), Fishkill (1778) & West Point, New York (1778-1779).

Nicholas Edgecomb
Robert Edgecomb
Thomas Edgecomb
Gibbins Edgecomb
Thomas Edgecomb
Mary Edgecomb
Benjamin Perley Philbrick
Lizzie Philbrick
Ray Everett Cotton
Fern Lyndell Cotton - my grandmother