Edward Convers, who left England with Winthrop’s Fleet in 1630 and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was the first of the family in America. The first account of Edward’s ancestry in England was presented, in 1887, by William G. Hill in his Family Record of Deacons James W. and Elisha S. Converse 1. This work defines a line of descent from Roger de Coigneries, b. ca. 1010, who came to England with William the Conqueror, to Christopher Conyers of Wakerly, baptized in 1552, who was proposed as the father of Deacon Edward Convers.
Research done by Eben Putnam and others and published in an appendix in
Volume II of Some of the Ancestors and Descendants of Samuel Converse, Jr., compiled by Charles Allen Converse in 1905 2 was sufficiently detailed to permit assigning Edward’s antecedents, with a high degree of probability, to the Convers family, yeomen farmers in and about the parishes of Navestock and South Weald in the county of Essex. Putnam even provided a tree (which is the basis for much of the material reported in this summary) showing three generations of yeoman ancestors for Edward. This has been largely overlooked by genealogists who favored the noble ancestry suggested by Hill.
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