49. Was Captain Francis Drake (d. 1687) from Bere Regis, Co. Dorset, England?

Captain Francis Drake (d. 1687) was an early settler in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is first known from a 1646 agreement authorizing a committee to lay out land.  He there sold his property in 1668 and moved to New Jersey, where in 1673 he was licensed to keep an “ordinary” (tavern) in the town of New Piscataway (now simply named Piscataway).  He served as captain and first commander of the “The New Jersey Blues”, a militia company, until 1685 [1, 2].  Today he has many descendants in the United States.

Lybaert’s “The Smoker, The Drummer of the Jersey Blues” (1900), Depicting the Uniform of the New Jersey Blues 100 Years after Capt. Francis Drake

Identifying Francis’ parentage has proved problematic.  Many, including my father and myself [2], concluded at one time that he was a son of Robert Drake (d. 1668), of Hampton, New Hampshire, but subsequent genetic testing showed that descendants of Francis and Robert were unrelated [1].  Also unrelated was a Drake from the line of the famous privateer, explorer, and circumnavigator Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596) [1].  Indeed, genetic testing has not yet found any close kinship of Capt. Francis’ descendants with Drakes living in Britain or Ireland [3].  Nor does Capt. Francis appear to have been the Francis Drake who invested in a lottery for land in co. Westmeath, Ireland, beginning in 1642 [4]. 

Recently, however, I began to wonder whether naming patterns might provide valuable clues as to the family’s origin.  Capt. Francis Drake named his first son George (1650-1710), and his second son John (1655-1740).  The son George Drake, my ancestor, was also of Piscataway, and left a large family by his wife Mary Oliver.  Their first two children were George and Mary, presumably named after them, and the next eldest son was Andrew (1684/5-1743) [2].

Might Francis Drake have named his first-born son George after his own father?  That was a common naming practice.   And might the names Andrew and John have somehow been involved?  Working from an estimated birthyear of Capt. Francis Drake of around 1615, I conducted a search in the period 1605-1625 for the birth of a Francis Drake, son of George.

The Drakes of Bere Regis

What I found was exactly one record: The 1615 christening of Francis Drake, son of George, in Bere Regis, co. Dorset, England [1, 5].  Furthermore, an Andrew Drake, of apparent age to have been an older brother of Francis, married in the same location in 1629 to a wife named Avis May [5].  To top it off, George Drake had a possible brother John, who in 1603 married Elsabeth Renthere, also in Bere Regis [5].  

All appeared consistent with the New Jersey family.  If these were family members in their English place of origin, Capt. Francis Drake’s christening had been found, he had a father George after whom he named his first son, and he had a possible uncle John after whom he named his next son.  In turn, Francis’ son George had a possible uncle Andrew after whom he named his second son.  

To be sure, the match is not perfect.  In 1601, George Drake married a woman named either Christian Harforde [6] or Clyristia Halforde [5] and she was presumably the mother of George’s son Francis.  Yet no Christian or Clyristia are known to have been members of the Francis and George Drake families in New Jersey [2]. A mitigating factor, however, is that Christian Drake, widow of George, was buried Mar 1617/8 in Bere Regis [9]. Francis may not have named a daughter after his mother because she died when he was only two years old, and he never really knew her. Nor, of course, did his son George.

Clearly, the match is quite good, and suggests that Capt. Francis Drake was of an ancient though poorly traced Dorset family.  The Drakes had been associated with Bere Regis since at least 1333/4, when Roger Drake was “in Milbome Stileham tithing in Bere Regis” [7].  

In 1641, shortly before Capt. Francis Drake is known to have been in New Hampshire, Bere Regis Drakes signed a Protestation oath that affirmed loyalty to King Charles and the Church of England.  They included Andrew Drake, as well as a Thomas and George Drake (listed together).  They did not, however, include Francis Drake [9].  In this case, however, the absence of a record may be meaningful: Although Capt. Francis Drake is reputed to have been a “hot royalist” [2], he was also apparently a religious nonconformist, as he and his family were associated with the Baptists [2].  Thus in 1641, his political self would have favored signing the Protestation, but his religious self might not have.

Conclusion

Should the Bere Regis connection to Capt. Francis Drake be considered proved?  Not yet, in my opinion.  The circumstantial evidence is fairly strong, but there is no “smoking gun” proving the connection.  Nevertheless, it seems a promising lead in connecting this Drake line to its English roots. 

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 Notes:

[1] Boles, D.B. (2020). The Omnibus Ancestry: 785 Documented American and European Lines, 4th Edition. Available through Lulu.

[2] Boles, H.W., & Boles, D.B. (1990). Foster Ancestors: Some Europeans, Immigrants, Colonists, and Pioneers. Available through Lulu.

[3] Information retrieved from https://www.familytreedna.com/public/Drake/default.aspx?section=yresults (2020).

[4] See blog entry 17. The Power of Convergence, Part 1: Francis Drake.

[5] FamilySearch, LDS church (2020).

[6] Information retrieved from http://www.bereregis.org/Docs/br-names.pdf (2020).

[7] Information retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/drakeinenglandge00wagn/drakeinenglandge00wagn_djvu.txt (2020).

[8] information retrieved from https://archive.org/stream/dorsetrecords12frye/dorsetrecords12frye_djvu.txt (2020).

[9] FamilySearch, LDS church (2020). Note that her name appears in the extracted record as “Christpian”.

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Picture Attribution:

Public domain.