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it. Two children were born to him after his arrival.
The early records show that he entered actively on his duties as a citizen.
He became at once a grantee of land.
‘He was made a freeman in 1637; admitted to the church in 1652; was for twelve years a deputy to the general court; a selectman twenty-three years, nearly half the time, from 1637 to 1688; was a rater for five years, and a commissioner “to try and issue small causes” for nine years, from 1663 to 1671 inclusive.
In 1645, he was “appointed one of a committee for building a new meeting-house,” and in 1663 was chosen “clerk of ye training band.”
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Roger, the second son1 of the emigrant ancestor, was baptized at Bicester, Aug. 8, 1632.
Marrying Mary Josselyn, of Lancaster, he had seven children.
In 1660, he removed from Dorchester to Lancaster, ‘that he might, with other Christians at Lancaster, join together for the gathering of a church;’ but, after the destruction of that town by the Indians, he removed to Milton (set off from Dorchester and incorporated in 1662), where he became the deacon of the first church, and died in 1698.
His fourth son, William, who was born about 1673, had, for his seventh child, Seth, who was born in 1710, and became, by two marriages, the father of thirteen children.
By the first marriage he had Seth, the grandfather of Major-General Edwin V. Sumner, who was an officer of the regular army, served in the Mexican War, commanded in Kansas during a part of the controversy between the free-state and the pro-slavery men, and bore a distinguished part in the war of the Rebellion.
By the second marriage2 he had Job, his ninth child, who was the father of Charles Pinckney Sumner, and the grandfather of Charles Sumner.3
The Sumners who remained in Dorchester and Milton during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were generally farmers,
1 From his third son, George, who lived on Brush Hill, Milton, descended, in the fifth generation, Increase Sumner; an associate justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, 1782-97, and the successor of Samuel Adams, in 1797, as governor of the Commonwealth.
2 By the same marriage he had, as his thirteenth and last child, Jesse, who was the father of Harriot, the second wife of Nathan Appleton of Boston, a member of Congress in 1831-33, and again in 1842. It may be noted, that one of Mr. Appleton's daughters, by his first marriage, married Robert J. Mackintosh, who was the son of Sir James, the English publicist and historian; and another married Henry W. Longfellow, the poet.
3 The following are reliable authorities concerning the genealogy of the Sumner Family: ‘Memoir of Increase Sumner,’ Governor of Massachusetts, by his son, William H. Sumner: together with a genealogy of the Sumner Family, prepared by William B. Trask; Boston, 1854. ‘New England Historical and Genealogical Register,’ April, 1854, and October, 1855. ‘History of East Boston,’ by William H. Sumner; Boston, 1858; pp. 278-307 (with a drawing of the St. Edburg Church). ‘History of Dorchester;’ Boston, 1859.
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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