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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Five
Watertown, Massachusetts — 1647 to 1655
Samuel Stratton Jr. was twenty-two years old when the shallop brought his family up the Charles in the summer of 1647. His father stood in the bow; Samuel stood in the stern, watching the banks. He had been born in England and had spent his childhood in Bedfordshire watching his father prepare to leave, and then a full fourteen years watching his mother run the household alone while his father built something on the far side of the Atlantic.
He was old enough to understand what it had cost. Old enough to be glad it was over.
Watertown in 1647 was a real town — houses and streets and a meetinghouse, orchards coming in, fields cleared and producing. His father was Mister Stratton here, a man of standing, and Samuel Jr. stepped into that standing and began to build his own.
He found work as a farmer, as his father had been. He appeared on the Watertown militia muster roll in December 1652, alongside Samuel Sr. and his younger brother John — three Stratton men on the same roll, three generations of the same stubbornness, learning to drill together in the Massachusetts cold.
In the spring of 1651, he married Mary Frye at the Watertown meetinghouse, on the twenty-fifth of March. She was a Watertown girl, born there in February of 1632, from a family that would spread itself across Essex County in the coming decades. She was nineteen when they married. He was twenty-six. They had time, and land, and the whole colony still opening to the west.
Concord, Massachusetts — 1655 to 1672
He moved his family to Concord around 1655. He had his father’s surveyor’s eye, and he knew good ground when he walked it. Concord had it — rolling farmland, the river valley, the upland pastures. The town was twenty years old and still in the process of dividing its grants. A man who could read land and had a stake to plant could do well here.
Samuel Jr. did well. He acquired lots, cleared fields, built a house and barn. He became Goodman Stratton of Concord, a neighbor and citizen, the ordinary fabric from which towns are made. He served on committees and appeared in court records and watched his children arrive.
Mary gave him seven children in the Concord years. Anna came first, around 1652, probably still in Watertown. Then Mary Hoar, born January 19, 1656, already a Concord child. Samuel the third was born March 5, 1660. John came in October 1662, and did not live — he died around 1672, a child’s death, the kind the colony endured and did not document extensively. Judah came in November 1666 and was gone by 1667. Eleazar in February 1668, who would live to twenty.
And then, on December 27, 1664, a boy they named Richard.
Richard Stratton was born in Concord, the fifth child of Samuel Jr. and Mary Frye. He was a Massachusetts child entirely — never saw England, had no memory of a shallop or a crossing, had no frame of reference for Bedfordshire except his grandfather’s stories. He was the colony’s own. The line passed through him.
He grew up in Concord while his grandfather Samuel Sr. was still alive in Watertown, the old man making his will in December 1672 and dying Christmas Day. Richard was eight years old when Samuel Sr. died. Old enough to have known him. Old enough to remember.
Massachusetts Bay Colony — 1665 to 1674
The colony Richard grew up in was forty years old and prospering, which bred, as prosperity often does, a certain carelessness about what it had cost.
Towns pushed inland from the coast. Harvard graduated its first American-born generations of ministers and lawyers. The economy was real — timber, fish, grain, cattle moving between town and port. The theological intensity of the founding had softened at the edges, as Samuel Sr. had noted before he died, and if the Half-Way Covenant represented a doctrinal looseness that would have appalled Winthrop, it also represented a community that had lived long enough to develop some flexibility.
What the colony was not looking at clearly was the ground beneath its feet.
The Wampanoag sachem Metacom — King Philip, the English called him — had watched his people’s land shrink for his entire life. English cattle in Native cornfields. English courts extending jurisdiction over Native peoples. Debt and manipulation and the steady pressure of a population that doubled every generation. His older brother had died in English custody. His own son had been sold into slavery in the Caribbean following a trumped-up conspiracy charge.
He had been building alliances for years. Quietly. Across distance. The Nipmucs. The Narragansetts. The Pocumtucs. He was not driven by impulse. He had run out of options.
Mary Frye Stratton died in 1674, before the war. Samuel Jr. was forty-nine years old, a Concord farmer with children growing up around him, and he buried his wife of twenty-three years in Massachusetts ground. The following spring, the colony caught fire.
Concord, Massachusetts — June 1675 to August 1676
It started in Swansea, in late June of 1675. Within weeks the fighting had spread from the Plymouth coast to the Connecticut River valley, and Concord — twenty miles west of Boston — sat exactly on the edge of the contested interior.
The militia called Samuel Jr. up. He was fifty years old, recently widowed, with a farm to run and children ranging in age from seven to twenty. He went. The Stratton men did not debate that question.
What he faced was unlike anything his father’s generation had encountered. King Philip’s War was not a pitched battle between formations. It was ambush and raid, burning and terror, towns disappearing overnight. The colony’s militia marched out confidently in the summer of 1675 and was cut to pieces in swamps and forests it thought it knew.
Lancaster, fifteen miles northwest of Concord, was destroyed on February 10, 1676. The garrison house burned, twelve colonists killed, Mary Rowlandson taken captive in the most famous episode of the war. Groton fell in March. Sudbury was attacked in April. The war was not somewhere else. It was fifteen miles away, and then ten.
Concord held. The town was raided and threatened and stripped of young men who marched to defend the towns that could not hold. But it did not burn. Samuel Jr. and the Concord militia kept the perimeter, watched the roads, buried their neighbors who came back in pieces from the interior.
He married Hannah Wheat on October 20, 1675 — four months into the war, midway through the worst of it. She was thirty-three years old, from Boston. He was fifty. There is something characteristically Stratton about that timing: the world is on fire, the farm needs tending, the family needs a mother, and so you get married. The work does not stop because things are dangerous. They had always been dangerous.
Richard was ten years old, watching his father ride out with the militia and come back, ride out and come back. He was growing up in a colony that was learning, at great cost, what it had built and what it had not.
Massachusetts — May to August 1676
The war turned on hunger.
Metacom’s alliance had been brilliant and devastating in the winter and spring, but it ran on logistics that the English were finally learning to disrupt. The Great Swamp assault in December 1675 had destroyed the Narragansett winter stores and killed hundreds of their people. Native corn supplies along the Connecticut River were systematically burned. The alliance began to fracture — tired, hungry, their towns gone, leaders seeking terms or fleeing north.
Metacom retreated to Mount Hope. On August 12, 1676, he was killed by a Native scout serving with the English forces. The war ended with something that felt less like victory than exhaustion.
Twelve English towns destroyed. Six hundred colonists dead. The Native peoples of southern New England lost far more — in battle, in massacre, in the disease that followed, in the slavery that awaited those who surrendered. King Philip’s severed head was displayed on a pole in Plymouth for twenty-five years.
Samuel Jr. returned to his farm. His children were alive. His second wife Hannah was pregnant with their first child — Joseph, born October 2, 1676, two months after the war’s end.
Richard was twelve years old. He had watched the war from Concord’s edge, old enough to understand what he was seeing, young enough to grow up in its aftermath as the normal order of things. The colony he inherited from his father was harder than the one his grandfather had built. It had learned what it was capable of. That knowledge did not make it kinder.
Concord and Chelmsford — 1680 to 1700
Richard Stratton grew to manhood in Concord and then moved north to Chelmsford, following land and opportunity the way the Stratton men had always followed them — west and north, always into the next town, the next grant, the next cleared field.
He married Naomi Hoyt on January 6, 1686, in Chelmsford. She was thirty-one, born in Salisbury up in Essex County, and she brought to the marriage the practical competence of a woman who had already spent years managing her own life in a colony that did not make things easy for women on their own. They settled in Chelmsford, building a household in the town that would hold this branch of the family for the next generation.
On December 1, 1687, Naomi gave birth to a son.
They named him Ichabod — a name from the Book of Samuel, meaning the glory has departed, given in the Bible to a child born in dark times after the Ark of the Covenant was captured by the Philistines. Whether Richard and Naomi chose the name for its scriptural weight, or simply because it was in fashion in late-seventeenth-century Massachusetts, is not recorded. What is recorded is the child: born in Chelmsford, the grandson of Samuel Jr., the great-grandson of Samuel Sr., and the man through whom the line would pass to Francis, and to the Revolution, and eventually to Indiana.
Richard married a second time after Naomi, taking Margarit Sheaf of Charlestown in April 1699. They had three daughters — Ruth, Mary, and Margaret Whitney. Richard died on April 8, 1724, in Chelmsford, at fifty-nine years old.
Chelmsford and Hardwick — 1687 to 1762
Ichabod Stratton married Elizabeth Hildreth on October 13, 1709, in Chelmsford. She was from Woburn, born the same year he was, and they built a large family in the Chelmsford farmhouse before moving west to Hardwick in Worcester County, where Ichabod died on October 31, 1762.
Their children filled the house: John in 1710, Richard in 1712, Isaac in 1715, and then in the winter of 1716 — first Naomi, born February 6, and then, on December 8 of the same year, Francis.
Francis Stratton was born in Chelmsford on December 8, 1716. He was the great-great-grandson of Samuel Sr. who had defended a hanged witch and refused to recant, the great-grandson of Samuel Jr. who had held the Concord perimeter during King Philip’s War, the grandson of Richard who had carried the line from Concord to Chelmsford.
He would carry it further still. That is the next chapter.
Concord — 1676 to 1707
Samuel Stratton Jr. outlived his own chapter by thirty years.
He farmed in Concord after the war, watching the colony rebuild and expand. His children by Mary Frye grew up and made their own lives — his daughter Mary Hoar married and left descendants in Middlesex County; his son Samuel the third farmed in Concord until his own death in November 1717; Richard moved to Chelmsford and started the line that leads to Indiana. His children by Hannah Wheat — Joseph and Rebecca — grew up in the postwar colony, Joseph dying young at seventeen in 1693, Rebecca surviving him.
He was a man who kept his head down and did his work. No court records of defiance, no dramatic fine, no accused witch defended from the dock. He was not his father in that way. He was perhaps the generation that a family needs after a season of drama — steady, present, building rather than arguing.
He died December 5, 1707, in Concord, at eighty-two years old. He had been in Massachusetts for sixty years. He had seen the colony’s founding generation die off, seen King Philip’s War nearly break everything, seen the Salem witch trials of 1692 come and go — forty-three years after his father paid a fine in Cambridge for saying a condemned witch was innocent. He had watched the Half-Way Covenant, the royal charter revoked, the new charter granted. He had outlived Samuel Sr. by thirty-five years.
The farm passed forward. Richard was already in Chelmsford with Naomi and young Ichabod. The line was set.
For the documentary record, see Samuel Stratton Sr. (1592–1672) in the family histories. Genealogical note: William’s direct line in this chapter: Samuel Stratton Sr. (1592–1672) → Samuel Stratton Jr. (1625–1707, Concord) → Richard Stratton (1664–1724, Chelmsford) → Ichabod Stratton (1687–1762, Chelmsford/Hardwick) → Francis Stratton (1716–aft.1779, Chelmsford). Verified from GEDCOM @I908@, @I899@, @I839@, @I827@.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.