The Westcott of Warwick Line
Devon → Salem → Providence & Warwick, Rhode Island
Founding ancestor: Stukely Westcott (1592-1677), FamilySearch PID: 9HZW-SXJ
The Westcott line begins in the parishes of North Devon, crosses to Salem in the religious-dissent migration of the 1630s, and roots in Rhode Island after Stukely Westcott’s banishment in 1638. Stukely Westcott was one of the founders of Providence and Warwick, a first-generation figure of colonial Rhode Island.
Origin: Devon, England
The Westcotts were a North Devon family of Marwood, a small parish near Barnstaple. Stukely’s grandfather Edward Westcott (b. ~1540) and father Guy Westcott (b. 1566) are both recorded at Marwood; the family moved eastward into Somerset by the time Stukely was baptized at Ilminster on October 15, 1592. By family tradition his mother was Mary Stukley of the Devon gentry, and his given name, itself a surname, reflects the documented sixteenth-century practice of carrying a prestigious maternal line forward as a Christian name. That maternal link is the contested colonial splice, not a documented fact: the 2026 audit found no recorded child of the Stukeley-Arscott marriage in Vivian’s Visitations, and the Mary Stukley to Stukely Westcott connection is undocumented and chronologically problematic. It is preserved as labeled family tradition in the archive basement, not asserted here as descent. The documented Westcott line is one of two medieval Devon lines in the family; for the other, the Coffin estate at Alwington, see The Portledge Centuries.
Migration: Salem, Massachusetts (1635-37)
Stukely emigrated with his wife Juliana Marchant to Salem, Massachusetts Bay, arriving June 24, 1635, into the Salem dissenting circle around Roger Williams, the teacher at the Salem church whose challenge to the Bay Colony’s authority would force his own banishment that October. For the brief overlap of 1635, Stukely and Williams were Salem neighbors in the same community of conscience.
Banishment: 1638
On March 12, 1638, Stukely was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for religious dissent, the same year, and on the same kind of charge, as Anne Hutchinson, who was expelled in 1638 and went on to found Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island. Williams had been ordered out three years earlier, in 1635. The three belong to a single chronological cohort of Rhode Island dissenters: Williams (1635), Westcott and Hutchinson (1638), and, twenty years later. Herodias Long, whipped in Boston in 1658 for her Quaker witness.
Founding: Providence and Warwick
After his banishment Stukely joined Roger Williams’s Providence settlement and was one of its thirteen original proprietors. Five years later, on January 12, 1642/3, he was among the company that purchased Shawomet from the sachem Miantonomi, the founding of the town of Warwick, Rhode Island under Samuel Gorton. Stukely is counted among the eleven Warwick founders. Warwick became the family seat; he was buried there in 1677, where his wife had been buried seven years before.
The Descent to the Long Family
From Stukely the Westcott line runs through four Rhode Island generations to Caleb Westcott’s mid-eighteenth-century marriage, then through the Peckham, Harrison, Winter, Swift, and Perry families to the present. Several of these ancestors are placarded on SwiftPage, WinterSwiftPage, and PerryPage; the convergence with the parallel Gardiner descent from Herodias Long is documented on her spotlight.
| Name | Born | PID | Relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| ●Stukely Westcott | 15 Oct 1592 | 9HZW-SXJ | 10th great-grandfather. Founder of Providence and Warwick |
| ●Jeremiah Westcott | 1633 | LZNS-Q16 | 9th great-grandfather. Stukely's son, b. Yeovil, Somerset |
| ●Capt. Josiah Westcott | ~1675 | LZKZ-R2T | 8th great-grandfather, surveyor and militia captain, Warwick/Cranston RI |
| ●Caleb Westcott | 6 Dec 1716 | LCTK-QTJ | 7th great-grandfather, convergence with the Herodias Long descent (also on SwiftPage and HerodiasLongPage) |
| ●Elizabeth Westcott | ~1760 | KNWZ-LNK | 6th great-grandmother, daughter of Caleb Westcott (also on SwiftPage and HerodiasLongPage) |
| ●Mary Peckham | 7 Aug 1792 | LR79-JWN | 5th great-grandmother via the Peckham branch (also on SwiftPage and CincinnatiPage) |
| ●Fanny P. Harrison | 25 Jan 1813 | 9F78-WDW | 4th great-grandmother, the bridge generation into Fall River (also on HerodiasLongPage) |
| ●Richmond Chamberlain Winter | 1839 | L4ZL-SXH | 3rd great-grandfather via the Winter branch |
| ●Fanny Harrison Winter | 1869 | 9VNZ-J6H | 2nd great-grandmother via the Winter branch (also on WinterSwiftPage) |
| ●Rachael Winter Swift | 1896 | 9JGN-43B | Great-grandmother via the Swift branch (also on SwiftPage and PerryPage) |
| ●Francis Swift Perry | 6 Oct 1923 | L1V1-8D2 | Maternal grandfather (also on PerryPage) |
The chain passes from Francis Swift Perry to his daughter Carol Perry, and through her marriage to John Patrick Long, to John, Perry, and Patrick Long, and their five children, the family’s living generation.
Sources
- Stukely Westcott, FamilySearch PID 9HZW-SXJ. 22 source descriptions, including Robert Charles Anderson’s The Great Migration Begins, 1620-1635(NEHGS, 1995), John Osborne Austin’s Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island (1887), Roscoe L. Whitman’s 1932 History and Genealogy of … Stukely Westcott: one of the thirteen original proprietors of Providence, and J. Russell Bullock’s 1886 Incidents in the Life and Times of Stukeley Westcote. The Providence-13 and Warwick founder lists draw on standard Rhode Island historiography (Bicknell 1920; Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island), retrieval pending.