John Doolittle and Joane Howell
Husband John Doolittle
Born: Abt 1571 Christened: Died: 1629 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England Buried:
Father: Thomas Doolittle (1550-1597) Mother: Joan ( -1613)
Father: Thomas Doolittle (1539-1606) Mother:
Marriage: 22 Aug 1591 - Alveley, Shropshire, England
Wife Joane Howell
Born: - Alveley, Shropshire, England Christened: Died: Buried: 1 Feb 1615-1 Feb 1616 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England
Children
1 F Joan Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Buried:
2 M John Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Abt Mar 1632 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England Buried:Spouse: Cecily ( - )
3 M Thomas Doolittle
Born: Christened: 20 Feb 1594-20 Feb 1595 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England Died: 1666 - Dublin, Ireland Buried:Spouse: Margaret Bowyer ( -1631) Marr: 10 Apr 1616 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, EnglandSpouse: Margaret Callow ( - ) Marr: 8 Jul 1632 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England
4 F Margaret Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Infant Buried:
5 M Humphrey Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Buried:
6 M Henry Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Buried:
7 F Elizabeth Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Buried:
8 M Anthony Doolittle
Born: 1605 Christened: Died: Buried:Spouse: Ann Yate ( - )Spouse: Alice Beansall ( - )
9 F Jane Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Buried:
10 F Alice Doolittle
Born: Christened: Died: Died Young Buried:
11 F Alice Doolittle
Born: Christened: 1 Feb 1615-1 Feb 1616 - Kidderminster, Worcestershire, England Died: Buried:
General Notes (Husband)
John a weaver on Mill St in Kidderminster.
John - whoever he actually was - had two sons. One, Thomas, went to Ireland and is the ancestor of the Irish, Australian and other points south Doolittle's. The other, Anthony, was the father of the famous Puritan preacher and schoolmaster, Rev. Thomas Doolittle, and from information on the web it looks like another of his sons possibly went to Ireland.
Marriage of a John Doolittle and Joane Howell verified in IGI: extract of local record.
Notice that it is not at all clear who actually were the parents of John, weaver of Mill St., and his wife Joan Howell. The names John and Thomas are both common in this family group, and he could fit into a number of Doolittle families.
Dollittle thinks he was educated. Kidderminster did have a free grammer school by 1570. He became a weaver in Kidderminster. His family probably apprenticed him out, and not to Edward who was only just out of his own apprenticeship. Assuming he was really the son of a farmer.
Joan Howell was the 21 year old daughter of Henry Howell, a yeoman of Alveley in Shropshire. This village was about 10 miles northwest of Kidderminster near the River Severn, and they married there. Dollittle believes that since her father was a landowner, which in some parts of England qualified one to be called a yeoman. (In other parts of England only feudal barons privately owned land, land was often held more or less corporately through a fictional or highly abstract lord of the manor, and land ownership wasn't how you qualified to be a yeoman, or even a member of the gentry. Usually the right to till specific patches of land or rent a cottage could be inherited for all practical purposes like land ownership, atleast until the usually very long period of the rental agreement expired. However, the wills and inventories of the Aggborough Doolittle's never mention land, and those of the Kidderminster Doolittle's usually mentioned real property.) Dollittle thinks that Joan would have brought a dowry to her marriage, and that some of her descendants may have continued to benefit from her family's holdings.
During the time when his children were small, "John seems to have kept company with a group of men known for their wild behaviour. On five occasions between June 1599 and June 1601 writs were issued for his arrest describing him as being of Mill St., Kidderminster, together with William Freeman, a gentleman of Boclkey, Yeomen John Pearce of Kynton, Richard Layte from Crowle, and John Baker from Trimpley, with other Kidderminster weavers, Edmund Hill and Thomas Layte. On the 20 May 1600 the charge against them was one of riot". The riot was a month before the birth of his sixth child.
"Thanks to the hoarding of many old documents by local law firms, we are able to pinpoint exactly where this family lived. Their house was on the south side of Mill Street at the western corner of the junciton with Bewdley Lane, a corner plot with buildings along two sides and with gardens. "
John prospered, and owned "'an ancent messuage or dwelling house and garden'" which had belonged to one Thomas Furdon which 'John Doolittle new builded and edified and now divided into three dwelling houses'. There was a garden with a hedge around it, a missen or pivy and 'one little parcel of ground upon which ... John Doolittle did heretofore usually cast his muck'". In 1616 he made over part of this house to his son Thomas. The "ancient" house waas in the oldest part of the town. I am not clear on whether he owned a total of two houses, including the house at Bewdley and Mill Street, and the ancient house on Mill Street, or just one house on Mill Street at Bewdley. The property that was split into three houses was in a prominent position on Mill St., not far from the center of town, giving the family a good view of all that went on. The three houses created from one were occupied in 1629/30 by sons John, Thomas and Anthony.
Gillian Dollittle originally had this John as the son of Thomas, husbandmand of Aggborough, married to Joan, who in her will in 1610 mentioned son John and his wife Joan. This version has been repeated all over the Internet. At most one individual was found who has caught up with Gillian Dollittle's new version of where John fits in this family group.
However, she has since moved this John out of this family and into a different family. After seeing the Y-DNA results, Dollittle realized that John the weaver of Mill St. who married Joan Howell, and gave rise to the line that went to Ireland, is more closely related to her husband Maurice Dollittle, than to Abraham who went to Connecticut. Gillian Dollittle has John's son Thomas as the Doolittle who went to Ireland, maybe together with a son of John's son Anthony, and maybe not. I have not seen Gillian Dollittle's evidence of this and do not know how accurately she has identified who went to Ireland. I also do not know how accurately she has put together her own line; her work is very speculative and Bruce Moorhouse, who is also descended from Maurice's line, was having alot of trouble making the connections that she made.
Maurice Dollittle descendants of John's son Thomas who went to Ireland fall into one clump of people with nearly identical Y-DNA haplotypes, and descendants of Abraham who went into Connecticut fall into another clump of people with nearly identical Y-DNA haplotypes. The two clumps are consistently separated from each other by three genetic mutations.
How much mutation has occurred within the two groups depends on whether you believe the Doolittle DNA Project version of Maurice Dollittle's markers, or Y Search's version of Maurice Dollitle's markers. The two versions of Maurice Dollittle's markers are significanctly different on about five markers. The Y-Search version suggests that mutation did occur between Maurice Dollittle's line and the IRish line, which one would certainly expect after all this time, and further that one of the Irish group is more closely related to Maurice Dollittle than the rest of his line are. Parallel mutation seems unlikely in this case. Conceivably the lineages of the members of the IRish group who were tested are arranged in such a way that Maurice and the more similar member of the Irish group represent the older version of the haplotype, but I doubt that, because in atleast one case Abraham's entire group differ on the same slow moving marker, in the opposite direction. What is more, Abraham's marker is closer to the modal values for this haplogroup and more likely to be the actual ancestral value. So Maurice's marker is most likely a further mutation on one of the three markers that differentiates between Abraham's group and Maurice's and the Irish group, and Maurice matches the Irish group on the other two markers that differentiate between these groups. If one believes the Doolittle DNA Project version of Maurice's markers, then his DNA has not mutated at all since the two groups split, which is possible, but that would be the only line where that happened, and since teh Y Search results come from FTDNA which does reliable testing, I suspect that some kind of adjustment for one reason or another was done on the markers by the people who run the Doolittle DNA project. One must also consider that some of these people are likely to have had testing done in England, and FTDNA is in the U.S., and while the markers look like FTDNA's results some of it could have been done by a different lab, and conceivably the markers uploaded to FTDNA have been adjusted as well. There are a few markers that lab values must be converted between labs to get equivalent results.
Leaving aside this question about Maurice Dollittle's test results, they do fall into the Irish group of DNA results. The Maurice Dollittle and Irish Y DNA group differ from the Abraham Doolittle group by three mutations of one degree each. Within Abraham's group the lines average three mutations of difference, and within the Irish group it matters which sets of markers you look at. - the average change is either 3 mutations or a higher amount than that. Each group traces to a common ancestor born around 1600, more or less.
The Doolittle DNA project believes that the three degrees of genetic difference between the Irish-Dollittle group and the Abraham group amount to three generations of relationship. That is possible. Theoretically three degrees of genetic difference equate to more time between the two lines than that. Actually rates of genetic mutation in Y DNA differ greatly between family groups. However, once a rate of mutation is established in a family usually the group sticks to it; the rate of mutation does not change radically twice within a couple of generations - unless we are to wonder what chemicals people in the textile industry were using in Kidderminster in the 17th century. Therefore it is reasonable to believe that the common ancestor of the Maurice and Irish group and the Abraham group lived atleast a couple of hundred years before the common ancestors they trace to lived in the 17th century.
What is more, Gillian Dollittle has actually made the common ancestor of the Irish group the brother of one of her direct ancestors, and I think that her line and theirs may not be that closely related to each other - but that depends on which set of markers you believe.
Now for the question of where John actually belongs, where Abraham actually belongs, and where for all we know Maurice Dollittle's line actually belongs in a different lineage.
Gillian Dollittle and Anne Van Kempen between them have identified three complete lines of Doolittle's in Kidderminster, that do not connect within the time of Kidderminster recorded history, people in Kidderminster having apparently abruptly learned to write wills and city records as well as keep church records around 1500, when the invention of writing spread to Kidderminster. ONe line is the line of Kidderminster weavers and clothiers in which Anne Van Kempen places Abraham. Another line is the line of Kidderminster weavers and clothiers to which Gillian Dollittle traced her husband Maurice. A third line is the line of Aggborough farmers in which Gillian Dollittle placed Abraham, and in which she had also placed the line of John weaver of Aggborough whose descendants went to Ireland. In addition to these three lines there are also existing records of several stray children, individuals, and families who do not fit into any of the three known lines. Clearly the Doolittle family group was already large by 1500, and had been in that area for some period of time.
Dollittle found that an ancestor in her own line had fortuitously mentioned an otherwise unknown brother John who owed him money, and teh scanty details, such as wives named Joan, Dollittle admitting that Joan was an exceedingly common name in that place and time, also supported her decision to make John the brother of her ancestor Thomas instead of a member of the lineage to which she insists that Abraham belongs. Notice that there is no more proof that John belongs where he ended up, then there is that Edward the father of Abraham belongs where Dollittle put him instead of where Van KEmpen put him.
This presented a logical solution to Dollittle's problem that the genetic evidence presented; JOhn is now placed into the Doolittle family tree as a son of Thomas who died in Kidderminster in 1606, and brother to Maurice's ancestor Thomas weaver b 1559/60 who died in Kidderminster in 1624, in such a way that he is more closely related to Maurice than to Abraham, who she still places in the Aggborough line.
However, Van Kempen's solution to where Edward and his son Abraham fit into the family tree also puts Abraham into a line that does not connect before the mid 1500's with the line where Dollittle has placed both Maurice's ancestry and John. One would tend to think that Doolittle's who lived in the town as weavers and clothiers were more closely related to each other than to the line of Doolittle's who were husbandmen on the Aggborough farm on the outskirts of Kidderminster, but that is not necessarily true. Anyone who was apprenticed to learn a trade in Kidderminster or chose not to stay on the farm, or didn't inherit enough land and other resources to continue to farm on the Aggborough farm, would have been very likely to become a weaver because Kidderminster was a major center of textile production and that is pretty much what people did, besides growing food. Both lines of Doolittle weavers and clothiers that we know of follow a clear line of being weavers for atleast a generation or two, maybe longer, and then clothiers. So we don't know if those lines of weavers and clothiers trace back in the town to the 14th century when the textile industry developed there, or if Doolittle's were originally famers and gradually became urban over time.
I think that Van Kempen's solution to Edward's parentage makes a bit better logical sense than Dollittle's. Dollittle does have one good intuitive argument for her own case, though children of weavers adn clothiers didn't NECESSARILY become weavers or clothiers and we actually don't know what Edward did for a living or why he followed an itinerant career path. His career choice could have been driven by the collapse of the textile industry at that time. Maybe he was a typically passionate, stubborn, argumentative and not necessarily highly intelligent Doolittle and didn't get on with other family members. Maybe Edward's typically Doolittle father told him he had to pay him for something he was entitled to by right, and he said bleep you and left.
As to whether John Dollittle is really of the family of Thomas Doolittle who died in Kidderminster in 1606, maybe he is, and maybe he is not.
General Notes (Wife)
Died in childbirth following the birth of her 11th child. She was buried the same day her daughter was baptized.
Table of Contents | Surnames | Name List
This Web Site was Created 6 May 2012 with Legacy 6.0 from Millennia