Hannah Downer

notes

from Downers of America:

A manuscript written in 1790 by "'Joseph Downer gives the history of his own branch of the fatnily as follows :

" In the persecutions against the Huguenots, Hannah Vincent, from Paris, France, made her escape together with her brother, a Protestant preacher, to England, where she soon after married Robert Downer. They had two sons, Robert and Joseph. In the time of Cromwell's war Joseph came to Newbury in Massachusetts Bay and settled. He married Mary Knight of that place, by whom he had two sons, Joseph and Andrew. Joseph (2d) left Newbury and came to Norwich where he married Hannah Grafton."

This account, it must be remembered, was written about one hundred and forty years after the coming of the first Joseph to this country, and it bears evidence of having been based on tradition. If the date of the persecution referred to be fixed approximately at the time of the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572 (the later persecutions which raged so violently in France from 16G6 to 1685 are hardly to be considered) it would appear that a whole generation had been left out of the story, and that Hannah Vincent was more likely to have been the grandmother, than the mother of Joseph.