new Shalbourne data !!
Rehoboth Carpenter ancestry is quickly coming into focus now with the online publishing of English records. While problems remain, the overall problem of Rehoboth William Carpenter’s English roots are greatly clarified by the Abstracts of Probate Documents forShalbourne and adjacent areas in Wilts, Hamps and Berks,
seen at www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/BRKwills/
Document 10419 shows a Robert Carpenter of Shalbourne in 1609. The documents for the nearby city of Hungerford reveal the probable origin of this Carpenter group. Document
10164 shows the earliest Carpenter, Thomas, for 1524. The Hayward subject of this document is a cloth merchant. Thomas Carpenter should have been in a related business. His later descendant, also a Thomas Carpenter, in various documents is a named “dyer”. In 1625 this later Thomas Carpenter leaves his estate to an Alice Carpenter in document 7570. This might easily be the Alice Carpenter noted in a Shalbourne church burial document (Zubrinsky) for 1637/8. All of the relevant documents show connections to cloth merchants and underline the theme I have been reiterating for two years now That the Massachusetts Carpenters were the descendants of English cloth merchants. The most likely line of descent was from Thomas Carpenter the son of Roger ‘the spicer’ Carpenter and his descendants that spread into Newberry, Reading and adjacent areas in the late 1400s and early 1500s. These new documents will only be the beginning of a steady stream of material that will become available and clarify this obvious conclusion. See my website at http://pony.tezukayama-u.ac.jp/carp/CLERK.htmhttp://pony.tezukayama-u.ac.jp/carp/CLERK.htm
Bruce Carpenter
Clinton, Washington
Nara, Japan