Married:     

Children:   Abigal (Arnold), Hannah (Clarke), John, Elizabeth (Freelove), Mary (Forman),

                 Rebecca (Browning)

Baptized in Sible Hedingham, Essex, England on 10 April 1622, Samuel Wilbur Jr. was the oldest of five children born to Samuel Wilbore and Ann Smith. As a youngster, Wilbur and his two surviving brothers, Joseph and Shadrach, sailed to New England with their parents, settling in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where his father was made a freeman in March 1633. The Wilbur's stay in Boston lasted only a few years, because Wilbur's father became a supporter of the dissident ministers Anne Hutchinson and John Wheelwright, and was banished from the Massachusetts colony in 1638, joining many others in establishing the settlement of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island- then called Rhode Island-  in the Narragansett Bay, later a part of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. 

Wilbur was a land-owner as early as 1646 and he appears on a list of Portsmouth freemen in 1655, and the following year became active in civic affairs when he was selected as a juryman and as a Commissioner. In 1657 he was one of seven men who bought a large tract of land in the Narraganset country, called the Pettaquamscutt Purchase, which would later become South Kingstown, Rhode Island. For more than 20 years, Wilbur held important positions within the colony, serving not only as a Commissioner, but also as a Deputy and an Assistant. (The “Assistants” were the 12 members of the Governor’s Council.) In 1667, he enlisted in a Troop of Horse, and nine years later, in 1676, during King Philip's War, he held the title of Captain. That same year he was a member of a Court Martial held at Newport where certain Indians were charged with complicity in King Philip's designs. 

Wilbur was one of a select group of men named in the Royal Charter of 1663, signed by England's King Charles II, and becoming the foundation for Rhode Island's government for nearly two centuries. Wilbur's will was dated 21 August 1678, though not probated until more than three decades later. In it he left extensive land holdings to his wife and six children, and to his cousin William Wilbur of Portsmouth. The date of his death has not been well established.

(Taken in part from Wikipedia)

Trivia

Samuel and Hannah are the 5th ggrandparents of Commodore Matthew Perry

Back to The Rhode Island Ancestors