Ancestry Chapter 2: 1600 – 1650
John Steele Jr (1624 - 1663)
Steele Family Tree
Edward Steel (#8 ggf) was born in Essex, England and lived until 1631, but little more is known about his life.
John Steele Jr (#7 ggf) was the son of Edward, born in 1624. He was married to Mary Geal (1609-1631) and had a son, Daniel, in Essex. He migrated to the United States before 1645 and it was there that he married Mary Warner (1623-1684). Records show that he was wed in Hartford, CT and had two sons, Daniel and Samuel, and one daughter with Mary. John Steele Jr. died in Hartford, CT in 1653 at the age of 29.
Early History of Hartford, CT (Wikipedia)
The first Europeans known to have explored the area were the Dutch under Adriaen Block, who sailed up the Connecticut in 1614. Dutch fur traders from New Amsterdam returned in 1623 with a mission to establish a trading post and fortify the area for the Dutch West India Company. The original site was located on the south bank of the Park River in the present-day Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhood. This fort was called Fort Hoop or the “House of Hope.” In 1633, Jacob Van Curler formally bought the land around Fort Hoop from the Pequot chief for a small sum. It was home to perhaps a couple families and a few dozen soldiers. The fort was abandoned by 1654, but the area is known today as Dutch Point; the name of the Dutch fort “House of Hope” is reflected in the name of Huyshope Avenue.[6][7]
The Dutch outpost and the tiny contingent of Dutch soldiers who were stationed there did little to check the English migration, and the Dutch soon realized that they were vastly outnumbered. The House of Hope remained an outpost, but it was steadily swallowed up by waves of English settlers. In 1650, Peter Stuyvesant met with English representatives to negotiate a permanent boundary between the Dutch and English colonies; the line that they agreed on was more than 50 miles (80 km) west of the original settlement.
The English began to arrive in 1636, settling upstream from Fort Hoop near the present-day Downtown and Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhoods.[8] Puritan pastors Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, along with Governor John Haynes, led 100 settlers with 130 head of cattle in a trek from Newtown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Cambridge) and started their settlement just north of the Dutch fort.[9] The settlement was originally called Newtown, but it was changed to Hartford in 1637 in honor of Stone’s hometown of Hertford, England. (Hooker also created the nearby town of Windsor in 1633.)[10] The etymology of Hartford is the ford where harts cross, or “deer crossing.” The Seal of the City of Hartford[11] features a male deer.
The fledgling colony along the Connecticut River was outside of the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter and had to determine how it was to be governed. Therefore, Hooker delivered a sermon that inspired the writing of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, a document ratified January 14, 1639 which invested the people with the authority to govern, rather than ceding such authority to a higher power. Historians suggest that Hooker’s conception of self-rule embodied in the Fundamental Orders inspired the Connecticut Constitution, and ultimately the U.S. Constitution. Today, one of Connecticut’s nicknames is the “Constitution State.”[12]
The original settlement area contained the site of the Charter Oak, an old white oak tree in which colonists hid Connecticut’s Royal Charter of 1662 to protect it from confiscation by an English governor-general. The state adopted the oak tree as the emblem on the Connecticut state quarter. The Charter Oak Monument is located at the corner of Charter Oak Place, a historic street, and Charter Oak Avenue.
John Steele Jr (1624-1653)
First Tyner Family Immigrant
Tyner Family Tree
The first Tyner family immigrant to the United States was Nicholas O. Tyner (1650-1709). He was the descendant of the Tyners of Tyner Manor in Liverpool, Essex, England. Nicolas moved to the Isle of Wight in Virginia.
History of the Isle of Wight (Wikipedia)
During the 17th century, shortly after establishment of the settlement at Jamestown in 1607, English settlers explored and began settling the areas adjacent to the large Hampton Roads waterway. Captain John Smith in 1608 crossed the James River and obtained fourteen bushels of corn from the Native American inhabitants, the Warrosquyoack or Warraskoyak. They were a tribe of the Powhatan Confederacy, who had three towns in the area of modern Smithfield. English colonists drove off the Warraskoyak from their villages in 1622 and 1627, as part of their reprisals for the Great Massacre of 1622, in which Native Americans decimated English settlements, hoping to drive them out of the territory.
The first English plantations along the south shore within present-day Isle of Wight were established by Puritan colonists, beginning with that of Christopher Lawne in May 1618. Several members of the Puritan Bennett family also settled there, including Richard Bennett. He led the Puritans to neighboring Nansemond in 1635, and later was appointed as governor of the Virginia Colony.
Isle of Wight (continued)
By 1634, the entire Colony consisted of eight shires or counties with a total population of approximately 5,000 inhabitants. Warrosquyoake Shire was renamed in 1637 as Isle of Wight County, after the island off the south coast of England of the same name. The original name was derived from the Native American tribe of the area; it went through transliteration and Anglicisation, eventually becoming known as “Warwicke Squeake”.
St. Luke’s Church , built in the 17th century, is Virginia’s oldest church building.[4] In the late 20th century, it was designated as a National Historic Landmark in recognition of its significance. Many landmark and contributing structures on the National Register are located in Smithfield including the Wentworth-Grinnan House.
In 1732 a considerable portion of the northwestern part of the original shire was added to Brunswick County; and in 1748 the entire county of Southampton was carved out of it.
During the American Civil War, Company F of the 61st Virginia Infantry of the Confederate Army was called the “Isle of Wight Avengers.”
