John Damon, Jr.

John Damon came over to Plymouth Colony at about the age of seven sometime before 1628 with his sister, Hannah, who was about five, and his mother's brother William Gilson, and his wife, Frances. Gilson was also John and Hannah's guardian. After Gilson died, a fairly young man, in 1639, his will provided well for both John and Hannah, and dictated that "his nephew John Damon should receive my lot on the third cliff, after the next crop is taken off." John "succeeded to his uncle's residence, on Kent Street." When Frances died ten years later, in 1649, Hannah and John were made sole heirs. All evidence suggests that, as the Plymouth Colony Records state, "although he had no children of his owne, yet that he had two of his sister's children, which he looked upon as his own." Susan Collamore Damon, Davis' sister, in a journal entry on October 1897, quotes Colony Records of 1649: "John and Hannah Damon are allowed by the Court to be lawful heirs of William Gilson, it being proved by divers (diverse) persons that Mr. Gilson had often said that he intended to make these (his sister's children) his heirs."

He was born on November 11, 1621 in Kent, England. In 1633, he arrived in Scituate, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts as family heir of William Gillson. In 1644, John married Katherine Merritt in in Scituate.

His children were:

• Deborah, b. 1645; married Thomas Woodworth
• John, b. 1647, d. 1675, no family record
• Zechary, b. 1649, d. 1649
• Daniel, b. 1653, stayed single
• Mary, b. 1651, unmarried
• Zechary, b. 1654; married Martha Woodward and Martha Howland (widow)
• Experience, b. 1662; married Patience c. 1686
• Silence, b. 1663, d. November 15, 1702; married John Tower (died soon) and Samuel Tower (c. 1683)
• Ebenezer, b. 1665; married Bacon
• Ichabod, b. 1668; married Sarah Litchfield on June 21, 1708
• Margaret, b. 1670, d. November 1749; married John Bull
• Hannah, b. 1672, d. 1702; married John May and. Preserved Hall
• Martha, married Edmund Gross

John died in January 1677 in Scituate.

< http://www.scituatehistoricalsociety.org/families/DamanJohn.htm >

Arrived in America in 1628. Married June 1644, Scituate, MA