Scholarly interest in genealogy in the United States developed in the middle of the 19th century. Early steps in the process were the founding of hereditary organizations (beginning with the Society of Cincinnatus in 1783), and historical societies such as the New England Historic Genealogical Society (founded in 1845). Among the most important founders of American genealogy was James Savage, who compiled The Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, (published 1860–1862). Savage was probably the first to attempt to make connections between the early Rockwells. In his discussion of William’s son John, he listed the children documented at Windsor and then says he “rem. [removed] to Stamford…” But he also gave a separate listing for a John of Greenwich or Rye (both near Stamford) to account for an estate inventory. Savage also referred to Josiah of Norwich as “perhaps s. [son] of William.” From this early and still much-used reference work, the idea grew up that all Rockwells descend from William of Windsor. Later research would provide evidence that John, son of William, died in Windsor and was definitely a different individual than John of Stamford. Savage’s account reflects the early state of genealogical research when he was writing.

Around the same time, Henry Stiles was compiling the first edition of his History of Ancient Windsor, which would give considerable treatment to the genealogy of early settlers. His first edition had no mention of John Rockwell. A supplement published in 1863 noted the recent discovery of the probate volume containing the wills of John and Wilmot Rockwell. Stiles wrote: “Query: Who can inform us of the origin of this family?”

The earliest attempt to compile a genealogy of the different lines of Rockwells was Henry Ensign Rockwell’s The Rockwell Family in America (1873). This work consists mainly of William lines, not very systematically arranged and thus difficult to navigate. While most individuals are annotated with numbers identifying their supposed generation from William, one often has to hunt in order to find the person’s parents. Also it manages to absorb some lines later found to come out of Fairfield County from the John line, as with the branch starting at Lanesborough, Massachusetts, (p. 26) and continuing into Vermont and Bradford County, Pennsylvania. The New London County descendants of Josiah are brought in as well, by a confusion of Josiah of Middletown, a William grandson who married Abigail Loomis, with the father of the Josiah who married Ann Bliss at Norwich in 1688.

To his credit, Henry Ensign Rockwell does give a separate section to the Fairfield County line. He speculates whether John of Stamford was William’s brother [for he didn’t discuss John and Wilmot (Cade) Rockwell of Windsor]; but he also includes an alternative view in the body of a long letter from John descendant Rev. George Rockwell of Alexander Bay, Jefferson County, New York, who mentions comparing notes with a William-line descendant. Rev. George writes: “We both came to the opinion that Deacon William … was not really the progenitor of our [Fairfield County] family.” (p. 200).

Five years later, Stephen Whitney Phoenix published his massive, 3-volume work on the Whitney family, endeavoring to include all descendants of Henry Whitney regardless of surname. As the Fairfield County Rockwells married into this family early on, this work serves as the first extensive genealogy of the John line. Phoenix was quite thorough, consulting original records; and he was well-organized, introducing a numbering scheme that references both forward and backward between generations.

The Whitney genealogy of 1878 became the model—and a substantial source—for another work, The Genealogy of the descendants of John Rockwell of Stamford, Conn., and of Ralph Keeler of Milford, Conn., by James Boughton. This author extended several of the lines into the 1890s through correspondence. Unfortunately, Boughton died in 1898, leaving the work to be tidied up by others and published posthumously in 1903. The editing was incomplete, and numerous inconsistencies and errors will be found in the text, including “blind references” that do not lead to the right individuals.

Since then, most of what has been published has been on a narrower scope, covering single lines. These include Francis W. Rockwell’s The Rockwell Family in One Line of Descent (1924) and Donald Shumway Rockwell’s Eleven Centuries of the Remote Ancestry of the Rockwell family (1914). (Most of the “centuries” referred to are not Rockwells per se but medieval lineage from the Norman dukes and William the Conqueror down to the Drakes of Devon, tying into the Rockwells when William Rockwell’s grandson Joseph married Elizabeth Drake. Unfortunately, the editors of Frederic Weis’ classic Ancestral roots of certain American colonists who came to America before 1700 have in recent editions removed Windsor settler John Drake from connection with the royal pedigree, calling it undocumented.)

More recent Rockwell works include Earl Close’s The Family of Linnie Fay Rockwell, a John-line account now in its 3rd edition (1999), and Weeden R. Nichols’ The Descendants of John Rockwell II and Wilmot Cade, which covers much of Phoenix’s and Boughton’s works and adds more recent generations and new research finds. Its 2nd edition was prepared in 1999, and the author has continued to add new lines through consultation with other Rockwell researchers. Meanwhile, the William and John lines have been the subject of continued research as well, but, except for individual articles and single-line books, no comprehensive discussion has appeared since 1878. In 1993, Shirley R. Brown, a longtime John line researcher who had just been elected to the board of directors of the Rockwell Family Foundation, stated, “it would seem that our next aim should be to get a major current book or so into print on any of the known Rockwell lines. I’m sure there’s enough material out there in people’s file cabinets.”—Rockwell Family Foundation Newsletter, no.6, p.5.

Through the early days of Rockwell research, two questions that have repeatedly arisen are: how are the different lines related (as previously mentioned); and where did they come from? As many of the founders of Dorchester, Massachusetts, who arrived in June of 1630 aboard the ship Mary and John, were natives of the West Country of England (Dorset, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall), early research efforts sought out the Rockwells’ English homes in that region. William and Susannah’s marriage record was located at Holy Trinity Church in Dorchester, the church of the Rev. John White, Puritan leader and early visionary of New England settlement. Honor Rockwell, of Dorchester, signed her will on 19 July 1637. This remarkable document, arguably the most important in early Rockwell history, provides the link between the Rockwells of old and New England. Published in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register (vol. 49, p. 270–71) in 1895 by Henry F. Waters, it refers to two sons, William and John, in New England, and to another son, Richard, who was deceased, but who had children, some of whom were in New England. This evidence suggests the probable relationship of the two Rockwells of Windsor, Connecticut: they were brothers. As for the children of Richard in New England, not named individually in the will, one could wonder if they included John of Stamford or Josiah of Norwich. As to the Rockwells’ original home, even prior to Dorchester, England, conclusive evidence pointed to the small village of Fitzhead in Somerset, some seven miles northwest of Taunton. Records at the parish church of Saint James show that Honor Rockwell was buried there in August, 1637; and that she, as Honor Newton, had married there in 1583 to John Rockwell. Several children were baptized there, including John, in 1588, and William, in 1590. John and Honor’s son John married Wilmot Cade on 22 February 1619/20. This was clearly the home of the New England Rockwells, who may have earlier gone to Dorchester, county Dorset, because of the Puritan activity at John White’s church. Another find in the Fitzhead parish records was the baptism of John, son of John and Wilmot, on 22 July 1621. While the wills of John and Wilmot suggested to early researchers that any children other than those named must have died previously, an alternative suggested itself to the descendants of the Fairfield County line: might not their ancestor at Stamford be this same son of John of Windsor? Perhaps he set out on his own as a young man. It was common enough for children who moved away from their parents in the lifetime of the latter to be given a legacy at the time of departure, resulting in the child not being mentioned in the parents’ wills. It does not necessarily indicate estrangement, only that accounts have previously been settled, leaving no reason to mention the child who now lived far away.

This theory about the John line was debated and discussed among various Rockwell researchers in the 1980s and early 1990s, so that it was the prevailing theory when these and other Rockwell researchers organized the Rockwell Family Foundation in 1992 to further the work of family research. At the same time, the thought about the Josiah line in New London County was that they might be unrelated to the Fitzhead family, since no record in either England or New England had yet shown evidence of Josiah prior to his appearance at New London.

This is where things stood at the turn of the millennium, and barring the discovery of contemporary documents with new data, there it might have remained, in the realm of speculation and possibilities. Then a new source of evidence appeared from an unexpected source: the ultramodern field of molecular genetics. And we have Thomas Jefferson, of all people, to thank for awareness of this new opportunity. In the summer of 1999, the story broke in the news media that a test had been run on samples from a descendant of Jefferson’s uncle and a descendant of his slave, Sally Hemings. The test compares the DNA of the Y chromosome, which is passed only through the male line, from father to son, preserving an exact copy from generation to generation, except for occasional mutations. If two men are descended, through all-male lines, from the same man, this Y-chromosome DNA should be almost identical in the two. The test that made the news showed that the Hemings descendants indeed had a Jefferson ancestor—possibly the President himself.

While this story received widespread attention due to its historical interest, it brought the intricacies of DNA analysis to the awareness of the general public. After the present writer had read of it, an idea soon dawned on me: this test could prove or disprove whether John of Stamford and Josiah of Norwich are indeed related to William and John of Windsor. All it would take would be a sample from each of the three lines. A match of either John or Josiah to William would establish a link, if not as a son of either Rockwell in Windsor, at least as a close relative.

And indeed, once a test was run on 35 Rockwell men in 2002, the results were conclusive: all three early settlers shared the same DNA signature, and were thus closely related. The relationship of John and Josiah to William cannot be pinpointed with current DNA technology, but they could easily be nephews, as our standing hypothesis has it. John’s descendants may thus be fairly certain where their English roots lie: in the Somerset village of Fitzhead.