Robert Lovell’s Holdings
Map outline from the Weymouth Historical Society, provided by Phil Thornton
Like the Lovewells of America who followed him, when an Englishman named Robert Lovell turned forty he decided to head west. In 1635 Robert and his wife Elizabeth, together with their children Zaccheus, Anne, John, Ellen, and James, boarded the Marygould and sailed out of Weymouth, Dorset, England, for Massachusetts, where their home in the New World would be rechristened “Weymouth."
The Lovells were part of a tide of about 20,000 English settlers, most of them Puritans escaping religious persecution. Robert Lovell became a “husbandman” or farmer with the Reverend Joseph Hull’s company, part of the Massachusetts Bay Company.
The tan-shaded portion of the map above lists Lovell as one of the owners of parcels of land of a few acres each, in Westfield and King Oak Hill. The choice plots had been spoken for by the time Joseph Hull’s company arrived. King Oak Hill was considered a second-rate scrap of ground, but one with a pretty view.