Nineteenth Generation

77. Jeremiah BASSETT Jr. was born on 22 February 1722 in Norton, Bristol County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America. Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original English settlements in present-day Massachusetts, settled in 1630 by a group of about 1,000  Puritan refugees from England under Gov. John Winthrop and Deputy Gov. Thomas Dudley. In 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company had obtained from King Charles I a charter empowering the company to trade and colonize in New England between the Charles and Merrimack rivers. The grant was similar to that of the Virginia Company in 1609, the patentees being joint proprietors with rights of ownership and government.

The intention of the crown was evidently to create merely a commercial company with what, in modern parlance, would be called stockholders, officers, and directors. By a shrewd and legally questionable move, however, the patentees decided to transfer the management and the charter itself to Massachusetts. By this move, they not only paved the way for local management, but they established the assumption that the charter for a commercial company was in reality a political constitution for a new government with only indefinable dependence upon the imperial one in England. Among the communities that the Puritans established were Boston, Charlestown, Dorchester, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury, and Lynn.

The Puritans established a theocratic government with the franchise limited to church members. Winthrop, Dudley, the Rev. John Cotton, and other leaders zealously sought to prevent any independence of religious views, and many with differing religious beliefs—including Roger Williams of  Salem and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, as well as unrepentant Quakers and  Anabaptists—were banished. By the mid-1640s Massachusetts Bay Colony had grown to more than 20,000 inhabitants.

Increasing estrangement between the colony and England resulted in the annulment of the company’s charter in 1684 and the substitution of royal government under a new charter granted in 1691. The charter of 1691 merged the Plymouth colony and Maine into the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He died on 14 July 1793 at the age of 71 in Taunton, Bristol County, MA.

Jeremiah BASSETT Jr. and Sarah ALGER were married on 24 November 1748 in Easton, Bristol County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America. Sarah ALGER, daughter of Thomas ALGER and Sarah DUNBAR, was born in 1730 in Mansfield, Bristol County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America. She died in 1783 at the age of 53 in Taunton, Bristol County, Massachusetts Bay Colony, British Colonial America.

Jeremiah BASSETT Jr. and Sarah ALGER had the following children: