Meet our Ancestor – John Sharp

John Sharp of Brookline, Massachusetts is our ancestor, as follows…

John Sharp (1643-1676)

John is the Father of William Sharpe (1674-1751) who was born in Milton, Massachusetts and migrated to Pomfret, Connecticut as an adult.

William is the Father of Elizabeth Sharpe (1718-1803)

Elizabeth is the Mother of John Griggs (1750-1817)

John is the Father of Ruth Griggs (1787-????)

Ruth is the Mother of Sylvanus D. Weeks (1819-1895)

Sylvanus is the Father of Mary Emma Weeks (1857-1923)

Mary is the Mother of William Austin Pearl (1880-1970)

William is the Father of Beatrice Thayer (1907-2005), Dorothy Overbaugh (1909-2001), Eleanor Moon (1911-2004) and William Pearl (1915-1989).

So, John would be my G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-Great-Grandfather. (As he no doubt is of thousands of other folks as well.)

On April 21, 1676 John was a lieutenant under the command of Captain Samuel Wadsworth: who was apparently a former Sudbury, Massachusetts resident who moved to Milton in 1656. With 100 or so men, Wadsworth marched to Sudbury in response to a call for help against the Indians attacking the settlers there – the “Sudbury Fight” of King Phillip’s War. Captain Wadsworth was very influential in Milton, and appears to have been married to a sister of John’s Wife, Martha Vose.

The men were ambushed, and Captain Wadsworth fell along with 28 of his men, including John Sharp. They were buried in a mass grave nearby, then reinterred under a large mound with memorial a few feet away, in 1852.

At the time of the battle, many of the survivors took refuge in the “Goodenow Garrison House” – a fortified home nearby. Some of that structure still stands and now serves as an Animal Rescue shelter.

The memorial is in Mt. Wadsworth Cemetery, just a few hundred yards from the church where I now serve – Memorial Congregational Church UCC. (Members of the Goodenow family, who owned the Garrison House, have been members of Memorial Church since the founding of the original congregation in 1640.) I drove by that cemetery for many years before I realized a distant ancestor of ours was buried in a place of honor there.

John was 33 at the time of his death. He was the father of 5 children, of whom William was the youngest (just 2 years old). His mother Martha Vose Sharp (1643-1683) was an immigrant from England. After John’s death she married Jabez Buckminster and remained in Milton, Massachusetts for the rest of her life. She had no further children.