Re: The Pasco Whitfords
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In reply to:
The Pasco Whitfords
3/22/01
In reply to your query about Pasco Whitford
of East Greenwich, Rhode Island: Very few records have been uncovered regarding him.
He first appears in a Newport tax list in 1680, and in 1683 is mentioned in the will of Charles "Macarte" (probably MacCarthy) of East Greenwich, who bequeathed Pasco some sheep. Pasco was admitted as a freeman in the town of East Greenwich in 1689, and in 1690 was voted a freeman of the Colony by the Rhode Island General Assembly. A tombstone marked "PW/1690" in the Whitford-Tarbox Cemetery in East Greenwich is believed to mark his grave.
The long-circulated identification of his wife as Mary Stanton appears to be based on pure conjecture; no record of his wife's name
is found in any published colonial document nor in any other record I have seen in RI town or state archives.
Several Whitford researchers at the turn of the century discovered that the name "Pascoe"
is common in and around Truro, Cornwall, England, and the assumption is that he may have been born there. Family legend, as reported in the private manuscript written in the 1860s by a descendant, William Whitford of Addison, Vermont, claims that Pasco came to Rhode Island via the West Indies with
three brothers, having been driven from one of the islands by the French in their periodic wars for control of the West Indies with the British. To my knowledge, no one has found any record to verify this. And no
record of any additional Whitford brothers
has been found (the legend of the three brothers seems to live in every colonial
family!) It should be noted that in
William Whitford's manuscript, now available in a new typescript, he mistakenly assumes that his grandfather, also named Pasco Whitford, b. ca. 1700, was the immigrant Pasco; William's grandfather would instead be the immigrant Pasco's grandson.
There is no record documenting that Pasco
was the father of the two men who all researchers assume were his sons:
Pasco Whitford of North Kingstown, Rhode Island(d. before 1727 when his estate was administered) and Nicholas Whitord of East
and later West Greenwich, RI (d. 1747), who
was the father of William Whitford's
grandfather Pasco. These two men appear to
be the progenitors of all the RI Whitfords
who trace their ancestry back to the
late 1600s. (A Capt. Thomas Whitford, of
Bristol, England, who arrived at Newport,
RI, in the late 1740s and lived there through
the 1760s, seems not to have had
any children who survived.)
Since the emigrant Pasco appears for the first time in a Rhode Island record in 1680, one assumes that both of his putative sons,
Pasco and Nicholas, were born outside of New England.
Research on the Whitfords in England
seems to show that the name was most
common in Cornwall, but there is a
village called Whitford in South Wales
as well as in Devonshire.
Austin's "Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode
Island" has a short entry on Pasco; Alden
Beaman published a partial genealogy of
a line of descent from Pasco Whitford
of North Kingstown in 1979 in the RI
Genealogical Register; and the papers of
Walter Coates, compiled in the 1940s,
now titled "The Whitford Family in America,"
can be reviewed by members of the NE Historic Genealogical Society at their
Boston library. Coates attempted, but did
not complete, a Whitford genealogy, and
his papers have much information.