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Quite a mundane series, it seemed, all internal within the Standish of Duxbury family, all long after Thomas Duxbury's sale of Duxbury Hall in 1524 (my first cut off date for a long time) and some of them long after Myles's departure to America in 1620 (my second cut off date for a long time). An examination of this series therefore remained a low priority until rather late in the ‘Myles Standish story’. When I started to call up some of these documents one after the other, the cut off date extended through the Civil War and later to Colonel Richard’s death in 1662.
It was only after sorting out the basic biographies of members of the various Standish families in Duxbury leading up to and beyond the Civil War, which were made rather clear from their wills, baptism, marriage and burial records in Chorley and other local Parish Registers, that I smelled a few rats in this series of dates and wondered whether they really did follow on from each other as a result of normal family events. For example, no marriage was known (so far) in 1640/1; and who was the widow in 1647? What happened in 1654/5? And earlier, what about the strange settlements and annulments between James and his younger son Christopher, when his elder son Thomas was still alive and producing lots of babies?
This list indicates how deceptive brief abstracts in a catalogue can be, as the full MSS of 21/7-11 revealed fascinating details of internal dissent within the family in the 1560s and 1570s (not totally irrelevant, one might presume, with the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 and her immediate and subsequent attempts at religious reform); 21/12 (and its duplicate in 12a) finally sorted out at one fell swoop various genealogical anomalies in Duxbury and tied Shakespeare's contemporary Standishes of Duxbury intimately to the Hoghtons when young Shakespeare (by tradition) was in the Hoghton household; and 21/13-17 provided vital details about the last three generations at Duxbury Hall. 21/16-17 also provided the fairly definitive story of the destiny of Duxbury Hall and dependent estates during and after the Civil War.
DP397/21/16 explained at one fell swoop how Colonel Richard, of a cadet Standish of Duxbury family, came to take over Duxbury Hall and all dependent estates during the Civil War (the full text was given in his biography – published on this web site). 21/17 solved at one fell swoop Myles's ancestry in the Standishes of Duxbury, and it is on this document that we now concentrate.