Edward
Colburn
[uncertain]
aka Colborne, Colborn, Colburne, Colbourne, Coburn, Corborne, Coleburn
Born in England
Son of Unknown Colburn
and [mother unknown]
Brother of
Robert Colburn
Husband of
Hannah (Unknown) Colborne
— married
about 1642 (to 17 Feb 1700) in Massachusetts Bay Colony [uncertain]
Descendants [uncertain] 
Father of
John Colburn, Robert (Colborn) Coleburn, Thomas Colburn, Edward Colburn Jr., Daniel Colburn Sr., Hannah (Colburn) Wright, Ezra (Colborne) Colburn, Joseph (Colborne) Coburn and Lydia (Colborne) Walker
Died
at about age 82
in Chelmsford, Middlesex, Province of Massachusetts Bay
Profile managers:
Bobbie Hall 
[send private message], Wanda Skidmore [send private message], Puritan Great Migration Project WikiTree [send private message], Steven Barcomb [send private message], and Libbi Crowe [send private message]
[send private message], Wanda Skidmore [send private message], Puritan Great Migration Project WikiTree [send private message], Steven Barcomb [send private message], and Libbi Crowe [send private message]Profile last modified
| Created 29 Nov 2015
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| Edward Colburn migrated to New England during the Puritan Great Migration (1621-1640). (See The Great Migration (Series 2), by R. C. Anderson, vol. 2, p. 144) Join: Puritan Great Migration Project Discuss: pgm |
Biography
Birth & Arrival
In The Great Migration, Anderson states that the origins of Edward Colburn are unknown.[1] He presumably was born in England. His birthdate has been established as 1618 based on his reported age of 17 when he enrolled as a passenger for New England on the Defence in London on 18 July 1635. He arrived in Boston, 30 October 1635 after a 54 day voyage.[2] Although Anderson found no evidence for his parents, he reports that Robert Colburn was Edward's older brother.[3]
Between 1636 and 1648, Ipswich, Essex, Massachusetts. While a resident at Ipswich, he was the superintendent and manager of the estate of Nathaniel Saltonstall.[4]
Marriage and Children
Sometime during 1642 Edward Colburn (Coborn) married Hannah, whose surname is unknown.[5] Their known children are all documented by Anderson:
- Edward, b. 1651
- John, b. 1645
- Robert, b. 1647
- Thomas, b. 1649
- Daniel, b. 1653
- Hannah, b. 1655
- Ezra, b. 1658
- Joseph, b. 1661
- Lydia, b. 1666
Military Service
"He was a soldier in the local Military Co. of Chelmsford during King Philip's War, 1675-77, was in command of "Colbron's Garrison" on the east side of the Merrimac as strengthened after the attack upon Chelmsford by the Indians, 25 February 1676, and continued in charge and pay until 17 November 1692, perhaps still longer. Corporal Edward Coburn was guarding the ferry 18 March 1675 when the Wamesit Indians killed two of the sons of Samuel Varnum and burned the Corporal's house. Was in command of local Garrison on 23 July 1689, during the first French and Indian or King William's War."[6]
Residence and Property
At age 50 yrs in 1668 at Dracut, Massachusetts he purchased land "Dracutt on Merrimac" and became first settler north of Merrimac on the coast.[6] The first garrison house in Dracut was erected before 1664, at least five years before the first settlers, Varnum and Coburn, arrived from Ipswich. It was part of the Military grant of 1664, and four years later was sold to Edward Colburn. He left it to his son Joseph when he died. In addition to operating as a garrison during the Indian wars, it also served as a court once a year, and as the toll house for Edward Colburn's ferry. It later operated as a parade ground in the years prior to the Revolution, and as a tavern.[7] The house was still standing at the time of the writing of the Genealogy in 1913.[8]
In separate records dated in February 1671/2, Edward and Hannah Coburn deeded land to their sons John, Robert and Thomas; in April and July 1682 to Daniel, Joseph and Ezra; in April 1698, to sons Thomas, Daniel, Ezra and Joseph, making allowance for sons John and Robert to have a share by paying a sum; in December 1696, to Ezrah; in November 1699 to son Joseph "the garrison house and which he is now actually possessed of," in consideration that Joseph was to continue to care for his parents.[9]
Death and Legacy
Edward Colburn died 17 February 1700.[10] Edward's widow, Hannah, died by 23 Jan 1712/3, when her grandson, John Colburn, included the funeral expense and burial costs for the widow in an account in the estate of Edward Colburn, his grandfather.
On 23 January 1712/3, John Colburn, grandson of Edward, and John Colburn, eldest son of Edward, were granted administration on his estate. On 29 January 1712/3 The inventory of the estate of "Edward Colborn Senior late of Draket" was taken and totalled about £67, most of which was real estate. On 21 February 1712/3, John Walker made an account of debts due from the estate of "his honored father Edward Coborn, deceased." The administrator's account included funeral and burial expenses for his widow on 11 March 1712/3. The heirs were listed on this document: Thomas Colborne, heirs of Daniel Colborne, Robt. Colborne, Ezrah Colborne, Joseph Colborne, Hannah the wife of John Wright, Lidia the wife of John Walker, and "the administrator & others children of Jno. eldest son."[11]
Discussion about Origins
As stated earlier in his biography, the most authoritative source at this point, Anderson, found no evidence for his parents, but reports that Robert Colburn was Edward's older brother.[3]
"3 early New England immigrant Colburns:
- William Colburn of Boston
- Robert Colburn of Dracut
- Nathaniel Colburn of Dedham
"No relationship between these three has ever been established."[12]
Lacking evidence, any source that provides proof of a link between Benjamin Colburn of Dedham, England, and his possible son Edward Colbourne of Chelmsford & Dracut in the Mass. Bay Colony, leaves these two men as possibly related. If a source is found, primary or secondary, please cite that source before linking the two men.
The following quote provides the authors' views:
- "It has not been thought advisable to attempt to trace the ancestry of Edward, but rather to confine our study to his descendants."[13]
Sources
- ↑ Anderson, Robert Charles, The Great Migration, volume II, page 144 (Link by $ubscription). Great Migration 1634-1635, C-F. (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2008.) Originally published as: The Great Migration, Immigrants to New England, 1634-1635, Volume II, C-F, by Robert Charles Anderson, George F. Sanborn, Jr., and Melinde Lutz Sanborn. Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001.
- ↑ Anderson, The Great Migration, volume II, page 149.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Anderson, The Great Migration, Vol. II, pp. 145-149.
- ↑ George A. Gordon and Silas R. Coburn, Genealogy of the Descendants of Edward Colburn/Coburn, (Lowell, MA: Walter Coburn, 1913), page 12.
- ↑ New England Marriages Prior to 1700: pg.167. Detail Genealogical Publishing Co.; Baltimore, MD, USA. Source Text: Edward Coborn, born 1618, Hannah. Reprinted by Ancestry.com Operations Inc Publisher Date 2012 Provo, UT, USA. Accessed 31 Jul 2019.
- COBORN, Edward (1618-) & Hannah [ROLFE?]; by 1642; Ipswich {citing Walker (1930) 21-22; McIntire Anc. 271; Dracut Hist. 371; Colburn-Coburn 15; Sv. 1:423} (Note that Hannah's surname Rolfe is unproven.)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Gordon & Coburn, Colburn/Coburn, page 13
- ↑ Silas Coburn, History of Dracut, Massachusetts, called by the Indians Augumtoocooke and before incorporation, the wildernesse north of the Merrimac. First permanent settlement in 1669 and incorporated as a town in 1701 (Lowell MA : Press of the Courier-Citizen Co., 1922), pp. 355-6.
- ↑ Gordon & Coburn, Colburn/Coburn, page 14.
- ↑ Anderson, Great Migration, pp. 144-146.
- ↑ Essex Institute, compiler, Vital Records of Chelmsford, MA, to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, MA: The Essex Institute, 1914), p. 380.
- ↑ Middlesex County Probate Records, case #4773.
- ↑ Cox, Edward J. The descendants of Isaac Colburn, Jr. of West Dedham, Massachusetts (Transcript Press, Dedham, Mass: 1921), page 5
- ↑ Gordon & Coburn, Colburn/Coburn, page 3
- See also:
- History of Chelmsford, Massachusetts by Rev. Wilson Waters, M.A., B.D.,; 1917; Published by the Courier-Citizen, Lowell, Mass. E-book available in the public domain.
Acknowledgements
Contributors: Steven Barcomb, Elizabeth Crowe, Rich Davis, Bobbie Hall, Rosita Jones, Bob Nichol, Jonathon Dale Walter Myers, David McKnight, Leigh Anne Dear
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Images: 1
Rejected matches › Ewart Edward Colborne (abt.1882-abt.1965) › Edward Colburn Jr. (abt.1651-1675) › Edward Colburn (abt.1618-)
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Ann
These men were christened on 30 Jan 1618/9 (Edward) and 22 April 1617 (Robert), sons of George and Frances (Raball) Colburne, at St. Giles, Rowley Regis, Staffordshire. The parents had been married there 5 Sept 1614. They had an older son named John, chr. 13 Aug 1615 likewise at Rowley Regis. After the three boys, this couple had three daughters: Isabell (chr. 12 Nov 1620, Ann (chr. 28 Jan 1622/3; buried 18 Jun 1623), and "Frauncis," chr. 13 Nov 1625.
In all likelihood, the "Francis Colborne, widow" who was buried 24 Jan 1645/6 at Rowley Regis was the mother of the above six children. The fate of her husband George Colburne is unknown, but he could have been a casualty of the Civil War.
There is no mention in the R. R. parish register of any marriage or burial for the boys. However John may have married elsewhere and then have come back to Rowley Regis. That said, the John Colborne who married Elizabeth Winter at St. Michael's Cornhill, London in May, 1633 would be on the young side (as well as a long way from Staffordshire) to be the son of George of Rowley Regis, but it's certainly possible that the three brothers went to London during that decade with the oldest one getting married and moving back home, while the two others shipped out to New England.
In any event, there was a John Colburn / Colborne / Colbarn who had children christened in Rowley Regis later on, including a son George (30 Nov 1642). Possibly the George Colburne buried 2 Jan 1651/2 at St. Giles might be this boy, but if so I would rather expect the parish register to have mentioned the name of the father.
To quote from the bio, "[Edward's] birthdate has been established as 1618 based on his reported age of 17 when he enrolled as a passenger for New England on the Defence in London on 18 July 1635." Thus finding an Edward Colburn who would have been born in late 1618 or very early 1619 (if baptized within eight weeks of birth, per custom) is like hitting the bullseye. But this search was not merely about finding an Edward Colburn born in 1618 or thereabouts. Rather, it was necessary that the target have an older brother named Robert. That element is also satisfied with respect to the Rowley Regis pair.
Admittedly, if Robert of Ipswich, Mass. was the Robert chr. in 1618, brother of this Edward, he added a neat decade to his age in several records. That is not really surprising when you think about the burdens Robert was assuming in coming to the New World without parents, but with responsibility for his younger brother, and entering a society where his status as a minor would have been limited. But again, alternate identifications are lacking. Neither FS nor FreeReg has any Robert Colburn /Colborne etc. born between 1604 and 1609. (Cf. Robert Colborne chr. 30 Jan 1602/3 at Long Burton, Dorset., and Robert son of Tristram Colborne, chr. 17 June 1610 at Laycock, Wilts.)
Now sometimes people find some seemingly matching names on either side of the Altlantic and run with that, without checking out what happened subsequently to the Brits who are imagined to have settled in New England. Notably, you can find any number of online "trees" that equate John Potter and his wife Elizabeth (later Elizabeth Potter Parker Rose) with the John Potter who married Elizabeth Wood in Chesham, Bucks in 1630. E.g., http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~brookefamily/genealogy/woodelizabeth.htm; https://www.geni.com/people/John-Potter-of-New-Haven/6000000000653974015, etc. However, in that case the subject Mr. & Mrs. Potter lived happily ever after RIGHT THERE IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE. A bit of casual research shows them having children in Chesham and nearby villages while New Haven immigrants John & Elizabeth Potter were already in Connecticut.
The New Haven family was actually from Sussex, where they left a number of records right up to the point when they set out for the Puritan Paradise - and then they disappear altogether from Sussex. See the life sketch I wrote for Elizabeth at https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/968T-7FW. Unfortunately the wikitree profiles for this family are still something of a mess, with continuing bogus references to Chesham.
Here, in contrast, there is an utter vacuum of evidence for the continued residence of Robert and Edward Colburn of Rowley Regis in England following the sailing of the "Defence" to Massachusetts Bay in 1635.
Similarly, here we have brothers Robert & Edward Colburn / Colborne who seem to have left no English records following their christenings, but who magically appear in Massachusetts in 1635. It's more than a "nice story."
Sure I don't have a probate record to validate the above, but Staffordshire is not New England. Most people in England at this time did not possess enough property to justify the trouble and expense of a will & probate, or even to bother with formal administration of their tiny estates. I would encourage you do something positive and look for a probate for George Colborne if you think that there might be one.
To conclude near where I started, my search for the origins of Thomas Wood of Rowley, Mass. were frustrated early on by the common nature of both given name and surname. There were something like 167 men name Thomas Wood chr. in England during the subject timeframe. However, my ace in the hole was that he had a brother Obadiah, coincidentally (since we are talking Colburns here) of Ipswich, Mass. As compared with the 167 Thomas Woods, the IGI for the entire first half of the 17th century showed only ONE "Obedia" Wood - a child of Edward Wood, chr. in 1625 in the exact geographic center of England (Nuneaton). Further investigation revealed the record of the christening of kid brother Thomas, in 1633 (exact match for his age as stated in New England) in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. It also confirmed that there was good reason why no later traces of this pair of brothers (or of a third, Josiah), were found in English records. That was because by the fall of 1639 they were ensconced in Charlestown, Mass.
The problem, of course, is the older brother Robert. He was baptized on 22 April 1617. Yet, he was aged 28 in 1635; aged about 60 on 25 June 1668; and aged about 65 in September 1672. Furthermore, his wife was aged about 60 years on 25 June 1668. This is too consistent and too wrong to just be explained away. No 18 year old immigrated while claiming to be 28 years old - it is just not something that could practically happen in this early Puritan society. He would also have no reason to lie about his age in 1668 and 1672. Nor is it very probable that he would be married to a woman who was 10 years older than he was. Even Edward's birth date is off a little bit as someone baptized on 30 January 1618/9 would have been 16 in July 1635 and not 17.
Expanding your dates a little bit, we find Edward and Robert Colburns living in Staffordshire, Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, London, Lincolnshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Durham, Northumberland and Lancashire. It was not a rare name, and the name was widespread. I agree that we do not have any other perfect matches for Edward and Robert (but then yours isn't a perfect match either). However, this sort of negative evidence cannot be used as proof of anything as millions of records have been lost over the centuries. It is probable that we cannot find an Edward born in 1618 with a brother Robert born in 1607 as the records no longer exist.
Frankly, the discrepancy between Robert's baptism date and his deposed dates is very convincing evidence that they are not the immigrants.
edited by Joe Cochoit
I'm not worried about the six month or so discrepancy on Edward's age when he got on the boat. If he was the lad from Rowley Regis, he would have been "in his 17th year" at the time, so able to claim that "age" under an interpretation of the word that was still very common then. Also, he probably would have been anxious to impress everyone as more mature than he would have been deemed just based on birthdays. And sometimes those listed ages represent only the guess of the person writing up the manifest. You may be aware of the passenger list for the "Elizabeth & Ann" - also in 1635 - which specifies ages for my ancestors John & Elinor Whitney and their children, almost all of which are seriously wrong. For John himself, the age listed is 12 years less than his actual time on the clock if you accept the conventional wisdom about his parentage.
On the other hand, the age given for Robert Colburn's wife at her deposition of "about 60" is a different matter, at least if this was based on a statement from her as opposed to some man's judgment derived from the number of her wrinkles. Men have been known to exaggerate their age in order to impress the innocent with their gravitas, but I have never heard of a woman doing that.
I am also with you, as a general proposition, on the rarity of marriages in colonial New England where the wife was older than her husband by more than a few years. I have one (1) case on my family tree where the man was 9 years younger than his wife, but that's the limit. In that case, the woman was a young and (presumably) attractive widow aged 27 with two very young children while the man was just 18, an orphan. I think that originally he might have been just hired to help with the farm work, but then he realized that the children needed a father, and the widow -- well, like I say, by all accounts she was attractive. So such unions can happen; just not often.
Also in the case of Robert and Alice, don't you have the sense that he married rather late in life? From the fact that he had no children, might his marriage to Alice not have occurred until they were both near-- or past -- 40? It's one thing for an 18 year old to marry a woman ten years his senior, but a marriage between a 44 year old man and a 55 year old woman would not be quite as strange, even in New England. And then there's the more modern case of the very handsome President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron to his former teacher (Emmanuel just age 29 at the time of his marriage to the lovely, but 54 year old, Brigitte). But I digress.
Despite my concessions as to the problematic nature of the ages associate with Robert Colburn of Ipswich, I don't agree that the name was as common and widespread as you suggest. Yes, there are Colburns/ Colebornes / Colbarns in all the shires you mentioned, but I don't see the evidence for there having been BOTH a Robert and an Edward in any one of those places in this particular generation, except for the Staffordshire group.
So I am going to continue to view this as a glass half full, and I look toward more complete information about them (or other candidates) in Merrie Olde England. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading your analysis because (regardless of any disagreements we may have on the data or interpretation thereof) you do a great job of arguing your side of the issue.
I agree Edward's age being slightly off is not being much of an issue. The wife's age being a decade older while possible is extremely unlikely and requires direct evidence in order to ignore it. We can all find examples of older woman with younger men, but it was not normal, especially when we have a record saying they are the same age .
The point about the distribution of the name Colburn was not that I could find other examples of Edward and Robert Colburn together, just that the name is not so rare or unusual that we can say Robert and Edward of Rowley Regis are the immigrants. It is not like we found the name "Obadiah", to use your example. Again, just because we can't find evidence of BOTH a Robert and an Edward Colburn together and of the correct ages does not mean they didn't exist. It is just that the records have been lost or destroyed.
I appreciate the glass half full optimism, but frankly we have broken hundreds of lines of incorrect identifications found on the internet and even in published literature. We will need a bit more before we can say the PGM immigrant Edward and Robert Colburn are the same as Edward and Robert Colburn baptized in Rowley Regis.