John ‘Frenchman’ Solart, Sr.

Biography

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Solart-7

John Solart's birth date and place are unknown.

He was married about 1650 to Elizabeth Unknown in New England.[1] [2]

Children of John and Elizabeth Solart: 9 children were still living in 1678[1][3][4]

1. John Solart, d. bef. 1682
2. Joseph Solart, d. bef. 1682;
3. Elizabeth Solart, 13 Jun 1652, Wenham, Massachusetts Bay; d. 5 Dec 1734 in Beverly, Essex, Massachusetts Bay; m. 1673, Joseph Lovett
4. Sarah Solart, about 1653, Wenham, Massachusetts Bay; d. 19 Jul 1692, Salem, Essex, Massachusetts Bay; m1. 1683, Daniel Poole; m2. after 1686, William Good
5. Hannah Solart, m. John Trask;
6. Martha Solart, b. 26 Aug 1659, Wenham, Massachusetts Bay; m. Thomas Killam
7. Abigail Solart, b. 15 Aug 1664, Wenham, Massachusetts Bay; m. 10 Nov 1681, Mordecai Larkum Jr.
8. Bethia Solart, b. 28 Feb1666, Wenham, Massachusetts Bay; m. John Herrick
9. Mary Solart, d. bef. 1682; m. John Edwards

106 Main Street, Wenham, MA, known as the "Solart-Woodward House," was supposedly built in 1670 for John, where he operated an "ordinary" or tavern.[5]

Ezekell Woodward, aged about fifty-eight years, deposed that John Solart's estate had been in his hands since 1672 when he married Elizabeth Solart, John's widow. Sworn in court. [6]

His death record is in three places. The first is Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, [7] which says "John Soolart," died "24: 4: 1672." This is a Julian calendar date and converts to 24 June 1672. The source of this is the annual vital records returns from the towns to the Quarterly Court. The inquest into his drowning was concluded on "29: 4: 1672." [8], confirming he died five days earlier in June. The second place is the familysearch.org database "Essex County, Massachusetts, births, marriages, and deaths, 1636-1795." [9] This is taken from the same source, but the dates are all converted to the Gregorian calendar form. The compiler made a calculation error and has John's death as "24 of May 1672" and adds that he was a "Frenchman." The third place is the published Wenham vital records, [10] which cites John's death source as "CTR," refering to the Quarterly Court records. The town's original manuscript records from this time are lost. Here it is "John Soolard," "Frenchman," "24 May 1672," which clarifies which court source was used, and is therefore also wrong, as is the spelling of the name. Examining the archaic handwriting in that court source shows what appears to be a "d" is actually part of the "r" and a "t."

An inventory of his estate was taken on 7 Aug 1672 (valued at £575) and Elizabeth was appointed the administrator of his estate on 24 Sep 1672.

Old notes

[John Solart (1614-1672) and [ Sarah Cocke (ABT 1620-AFT 1678) - NO]

John Solart was born in 1614 in Wenham, Essex County, Massachusetts [NO]. He was the son of John Solart and Elizabeth Bedingfield [?]. The Solarts become a part of the Herrick Line when their daughter, Bethia, married John Herrick in 1684. Like many of the Herricks, the Solarts spent much of their time in the Essex County area, including Beverly and Wenham. Wenham was settled in 1635 and incorporated as a town in 1643 — at about the same time when John and Sarah married. Wenham is less than ten miles north of Beverly.

John married Sarah Cocke in about 1643. She is believed to be the daughter of William Cocke and Sarah Perrin. The dates of her birth and death (ABT 1620 - AFT 1678) are clearly guesswork, based on her marriage and the dates of the birth of her children. She may have come to Massachusetts from England as a child with her parents, but very little is known about her. (Unproven]

John and Sarah had at least eight children (there may have been another girl child not listed here):

1. Mary b. 1644 in Beverly, Essex, Massachusetts
2. Sarah b. 1654 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts (This is the Sarah [Poole Good] who was hanged as a witch during the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. See more information about Sarah’s fate later in this biography.)
3. Hannah b. 1657 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts Martha b. 26 Aug 1659 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts
4. Joseph b. 1660 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts Abigail b. 15 Aug 1664 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts
5. Bethia b. 28 Feb 1666 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts +#Michael b. 7 Aug 1672 in Beverly, Essex, Massachusetts

John was a well-known innkeeper in Wenham. In the fall of 1672, at the age of 58, he drowned himself; this was considered a sin by the Puritans so his suicide tarnished the Solart name. He left his estate to his wife and their two sons, Joseph (age 12) and Michael (a newborn). Part of the estate was to go to, according to his will, his “seven daughters”. However, Sarah Cocke Solart married again and her new husband took possession of the estate as well as the daughters’ inheritance; as a result, the daughters never saw any of their father’s estate.

It is believed that Sarah and her second husband had two children: Peter (b. 21 Aug 1674 in Beverly, Essex, Massachusetts; he may have died on his birthday), and John (28 May 1678 in Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts). If these dates are accurate, then Sarah was 58 when her son, John, was born. This seems unlikely, so it’s possible that she was much younger, thus changing her birth date considerably.

John Solart did not live to see his daughter, Sarah Poole Good, hanged as a witch on 19 July 1692. His wife, Sarah Cocke, may also have already died before her daughter was hanged, but the exact date of her death is not known. It may have been in 1678, after her son was born.

Partly because John’s daughter, Sarah, never received any financial help from her father’s estate, she was left in desperate straits. Sarah was 17 when her father committed suicide. She married a former indentured servant, Daniel Poole who died sometime after 1682, leaving Sarah only with debt which Sarah and her second husband, William Good, were held responsible for paying. A portion of their land was seized and sold to satisfy their creditors, and shortly thereafter they sold the rest of their land, apparently out of dire necessity.

By the time of the infamous Salem witch trials, Sarah and her husband were homeless and destitute; she was reduced to begging for work, food, and shelter. Some took her in, briefly, but she was apparently very difficult to live with. She was refused help by at least one sister, and by Zachariah Herrick, her sister Bethia’s uncle-by-marriage.

Sarah was apparently not well-liked by her relatives and neighbours. Her habit of scolding and cursing neighbours who refused to help her was mentioned by at least seven people who testified at her trial. Even worse, however, was that her own four-year-old daughter, Dorcas Good, was also arrested and “confessed” to both her and her mother being witches. At the time of her trial, Good was described as "a forlorn, friendless, and forsaken creature, broken down by wretchedness of condition and ill-repute."

Sarah was executed on July 19, 1692. It is not known if any of her sisters or brothers came to her execution. She never confessed and “showed no remorse” at her execution. She is said to have said at the scaffolding, "You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink."

Although he testified against her at her trial, William Good (Sarah’s husband) was given one of the larger sums of compensation from the government in 1711. Little Dorcas, Sarah’s daughter, was eventually released from prison, but her father claimed she was never the same and “never useful for anything.”

This page written and researched by Susan Overturf Ingraham, wife of Robert Philip Ingraham, a descendant of the Solarts. This page last updated February 3, 2012.

https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:John_Solart_%281%29

John Solart

Family tree▼

Spouse and Children

H. John Solart

W. Elizabeth

Sarah Solart
1653 - 1692

▼Facts and Events

Name John Solart

Gender Male

Residence[1] 1656 Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts, United States

Marriage

to Elizabeth
Will[1] 26 Sep 1672 Wenham, Essex, Massachusetts, United States

More About Solart-Woodward House < link >

Here, in this beautiful, three-story gray house, situated side-ways to the street, “The Frenchman” John Solart (alternative spelling Soulart) ran a successful inn. The father of two sons and seven daughters, Solart built the house circa 1670, when his daughter Sarah was 17. Sadly, in 1672, Solart committed suicide by drowning himself. When Sarah’s mother remarried, Sarah and her sisters struggled for years to gain their rightful inheritance, suing to get a small amount of property.

References

1. https://ma-vitalrecords.org/MA/Essex/Wenham/aBirthsS.shtml
   1. SOORLARD Martha, d. John, Aug. 26, 1659. CTR
   2. SOORLARD Abigaill, d. John, Aug. 15, 1664. CTR
   3. SOORLARD Bethia, d. John, Feb. 28, 1666. CTR
2. https://ma-vitalrecords.org/MA/Essex/Wenham/aDeathsS.shtml
   1. SOOLARD John, "Frenchman," May 24, 1672. CTR
3. https://ma-vitalrecords.org/MA/Essex/Wenham/aMarriagesS.shtml
   1. SOOLART Elizabeth, and Ezekiell Woodward, Dec. 20, 1672. CTR
4. https://www.werelate.org/wiki/Person:John_Solart_%281%29
   1. 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) 4:139.
5. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Solart-7 cites
   1. Ferris, Mary Walton, “Dawes-Gates Ancestral Lines: A Memorial Volume Containing the American Ancestry of Rufus R. Dawes.” Accessed at HathiTrust, vol. 1, p. 669-70, 672.
   2. "U.S., New England Marriages Prior to 1700," Ancestry.com, Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2012, Provo, UT, USA. Genealogical Publishing Co.; Baltimore, MD, USA. Page 692.
   3. “Salem-Village Witchcraft; a Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England : Boyer, Paul S., Compiler : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive. Belmont, Calif., Wadsworth Pub. Co, January 1, 1972. https://archive.org/details/salemvillagewitc0000boye/page/139.
   4. The American Genealogist. New Haven, CT: D. L. Jacobus, 1937-. (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2009 - .) https://www.americanancestors.org/DB283/i/12959/153/144755421
   5. Solart-Woodward House.” Salem Witch Museum. Accessed January 25, 2020. https://salemwitchmuseum.com/locations/solart-woodward-house/.
   6. https://archive.org/stream/recordsandfiles01dowgoog/recordsandfiles...
   7. Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, vol. 5 (Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1916), 261.
   8. Ibid, 124.
   9. "Essex County, Massachusetts, births, marriages, and deaths, 1636-1795, Essex, County wide, County court births, marriages, deaths 1654-1795," familysearch.org database online (Salt Lake City, UT: 1971), image 172.
   10. Vital records of Wenham, Massachusetts, to the end of year 1849, (Topsfield, MA: Topsfield Historical Society, 1904), 220. See also:
   11. Nelson, Mary Perkinson. “The Tale of the Timeline: the Solarts of Massachusetts.” The Tale of the Timeline: the Solarts of Massachusetts, January 1, 1970. http://celebratingfamilystories.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-tale-of-ti....
   12. Massachusetts Town and Vital Records 1620-1988, Wenham, Vital Record Transcripts, Births p 76; www.ancestry.com.
6. https://www.witchesmassbay.com/roadtrips/wenham/ Solart-Woodward House (1670), 106 Main Street. PRIVATE home. Innkeeper John Solart Sr. and his wife Elizabeth were the parents of Sarah (Solart) (Poole) Good, witch trial victim hanged 19 July 1692. Shortly after John drowned in 1672, his widow married Ezekiel Woodward (1625-1699) and they maintained the inn.
7. https://www.redfin.com/blog/salem-witch-trials-house-sarah-good-wen... This home last sold for $579,000 on Jun 7, 2019. < image >
8. https://firstperiodnewengland.wordpress.com/houses/ Solart-Woodward House/Kimball House-Solart Ordinary 1670 Wenham Essex MA