William Chandler

Our ancestor William Chandler was probably born in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, England, because his 6-year-old son William was buried there and that is where his family had been living for generations. He emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony with his wife, Annis Bayford Chandler, 1603-1683, and children as part of the Great Migration in the 1630s. The date was probably 1634 or 1635, since son William was buried in England in 1634 and daughter Sarah was born in Massachusetts in 1635. There is some doubt about the date, because William's 13-year-old twin daughters from his first marriage were buried in Bishop's Stortford in 1636 (their mother had died 11 years before).

This was a close-knit family. The daughter of William and Annis's daughter Hannah Chandler, 1630-1711, whose name was Hannah Abbott, 1650-1741, married the son of William and Annis's son Thomas Chandler, 1628-1703, whose name was John Chandler I, 1655-1721; in other words, John and Hannah were first cousin spouses. This John's younger sister Sarah Chandler, 1661-1757 became the grandmother of the Samuel Phelps III, 1712-1795 who married John's granddaughter Priscilla Chandler, 1713-1778, Samuel's second cousin. First cousin spouses John and Hannah had two sons, both of whom are are direct ancestors of ours, so that two of his great-grandchildren (Priscilla Chandler Phelps's son Joshua Phelps I, 1738-1798 and Lois Ballard, 1746-1836) were also married as second cousins. New England apparently had a very restricted gene pool.

William, his siblings, and his second wife, Annis, were part of the puritanical, idealistic Righteous Generation. His father was part of the heroic, civic-minded Elizabethan Generation. His children were part of the reactive, nomadic Cavalier Generation.