MARGARET BARRETT HUNTINGTON STOUGHTON

(1595-1665)

Margaret was baptized on September 29, 1595 at St. Andrew’s Church in the center of Norwich, England. Born to Elizabeth Clarke and Christopher Barrett, she was one of seven surviving children born to the future Norwich mayor (1634) and his wife.

They lived for awhile in the “Suckling House” next door to the church. The Barretts were merchants. The fourteenth-century merchant home, had an undercroft and a great hall where meals were served. They also were non-conformists–meaning that although they dutifully attended the Church of England on Sundays, they were also having puritan-style religious meetings probably in secret. Norwich had a history as a center of noncomformity.

Margaret, as the daughter of a prominent Norwich merchant, would have been educated as far as possible for a young girl of her rank in a puritan-leaning household.

She married, somewhat late in her life, at age 27. This could have been for a variety of reasons. In any event, Margaret wed merchant, and devout puritan, Simon Huntington, on May 11, 1623–it was recorded in the St. Andrew’s parish records. It is likely that he was a recent widower with a young son William Huntington.

A little over a year later, Margaret’s first son, Christopher, named for her father, was born in July 1624. Four more children would come in quick succession; the last, baby Henry, died in 1632.

Sometime in 1632 or 1633 Simon and Margaret decided that uprooting their young family to New England was worth the risk. They departed out of Yarmouth, England, for Boston, in April 1633 on the new Elizabeth Bonaventure II an armed galleon. They arrived in record time, however, Simon died en route of small pox. This event was recorded in the Reverend John Eliot’s parish records in Roxbury.

This would have been a frightening situation for Margaret with five children to care for. For a few years, she lived in the hilly town of Roxbury. William was probably sent out for his apprenticeship as soon as possible as well as Christopher and Thomas. Other families could feed and house her sons in exchange for their work–probably something to do with the nascent Boston shipping industry like coopering–which took many years to master and was directly related to being a merchant. Margaret’s only daughter, Ann, probably around six-years-old would have helped her mother eke out their existence. There is no record of where they lived.

In late 1634 or early 1635, Margaret made an important decision to marry Thomas Stoughton, of nearby Dorchester. They both had been widowed and needed to marry soon. Still, this would have been a careful decision by Margaret as she had “means.”

From a family of non-conformists, including his silenced puritan preaching father, Thomas Stoughon Sr., Mr. Stoughton was probably already planning with his Dorchester peers to remove to the wilds of the Connecticut River Valley as part of one of the first organized pioneer movements in American history. Hopefully Margaret was on board with this decision because now her fate, and that of her children, was in Stoughton’s hands. They were part of one of the first English settlements of Connecticut, eventually named Windsor.

The first few years in Windsor were rough. The residents had to live in or near the “palisade.” Food shortages were common. Then the Pequot War happened in 1637, where English troops massacred the Pequots at Mystic after the Pequots had murdered a few English fishermen and the like.

Although Stoughton and Huntington young men were not involved in this genocide, many of their townsmen were, including Captain John Mason, the leader of the massacre. Mason was a professional military man hired to protect the English settlers at Windsor. He, and the Huntington/Stoughton family, would be inextricably linked as Margaret’s sons followed Mason to Saybrook in 1647/48 and then to Norwich, CT in 1660.

As Margaret aged, her sons would leave Windsor, as most first generation sons did, to plant their own settlements in order to get more land. William went off to the wilds of the Merrimack River settlements, Christopher and Simon left Windsor as young men around 1647, to try their luck at Saybrook, Thomas eventually left his mother to settle Newark, NJ, around 1665, for religious and political reasons. Based on a letter from Peter Barrett to Christopher Huntington, Ann apparently rejected marriage and was still living with Margaret, in Windsor, as of 1649.

Margaret, Ann, and Thomas stayed in Windsor for the rest of their lives. It was probably never an easy life. Thomas died first in 1660. Margaret lived to be seventy years old and was “treated” on her deathbed by Connecticut Governor John Winthrop Jr., a puritan leader, adventurer, and alchemist, who ran a hospital in New London. She died in 1665. No Huntington gravestones, of this era, remain in Windsor.

Last Updated: December 2025

Abbreviated List of Links and Sources:

English Ancestry of Margaret Baret https://archive.org/details/englishancestryo02port/page/n7/mode/2up

Robert Charles Anderson, The Great Migration Begins database accessed via AmericanAncestors.com

First Church Roxbury Records accessed via Harvard Library online

England, Norfolk, Parish Registers accessed via Ancestry.com

James Cudworth to Reverend John Stoughton, letter of 1634 accessed via The New England Genealogical Register, April 1860, accessed via AmericanAncestors.com;

Peter Barrett to Christopher Barrett, March 1650, Connecticut State Library

Click images to enlarge

St. Andrew’s Church

Suckling House Undercroft