John Roper, {Fictional}

This person did not exist

Leslie Mahler, FASK and Nathan W Murphy, AG, The English Ancestry of Alice Reynolds Wife of John1 Roper of Dedham, Massachusetts. , in The American Genealogist (TAG). (Donald Lines Jacobus, et.al.), 85:222-34, July 2011.

• The authors review the research published by Lyman Mower and Ella E Roper and note that they and Robert Charles Anderson find them unreliable. They state unequivocally that that the elder John Roper in their books was not only not the father of John Roper (or Walter Roper) but he did not exist!

The following are not reliable:

1. Roper, Ella E. The Ropers of Sterling and Rutland. (East Orange, New Jersey: Fred.H. Colvin (under the auspices of the Roper Association), 1904), 1. John Roper, Sen., of New Buckenham, Norfolk Co., England, b. about 1588, sailed with his family to New England in the summer of 1637; settled in Dedham, Mass, in August of that year; died in Dedham soon after 1664. His wife was living at the time of the Lancaster massacre, 1676; date of her death not known. Probably two sons [John and Walter] came with them.
2. Savage, James. A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England: Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May, 1692, on the Basis of Farmer's Register. (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co, 1860-1862), 3:574. ROPER, JOHN, Dedham 1639, when his w. and d. Mary, join, with the ch. was freem. 2 June 1641.
3. Lyman Mower, Ancestry of Edwin Robinson Mower (Salem, MA: 2004) 539-43