Newport & Westerly, RI

A single interconnected dissenting-religious community that fled Puritan Massachusetts persecution for Roger Williams' Rhode Island, founded Providence and later Westerly, and repeatedly intermarried across four decades before some descendants moved north into NY.

Providence founders (1636)

• 🟢 Thomas Angell — original companion of Roger Williams
• 🟢 Rev. William Wickenden — 4th minister of Providence's Baptist church; jailed by Dutch authorities in New Amsterdam for baptizing converts; charged by Roger Williams himself in 1656, alongside Thomas Angell, as a "ringleader" of a faction teaching dangerously broad religious liberty

Newport/Westerly Sabbatarian (Seventh Day Baptist) founders (1660s–70s)

• 🟢 Rev. Samuel Hubbard — founded 1st Seventh Day Baptist Church in America (Newport, 1671); RI Solicitor General
• 🟢 Elder John Crandall — whipped in Boston (1651); Westerly's first Baptist Elder; died of Great Swamp Fight wounds (1675)
• 🟢 Robert Burdick
• 🟢 Rev. Joseph Clarke Sr. — RI General Assembly member; brother of Dr. John Clarke, who secured RI's 1663 Royal Charter
• 🟢 Tobias Saunders — Westerly Conservator of the Peace; negotiated with Ninigret (1675); m. Mary Clarke (Joseph Clarke Sr.'s sister)

Newport settler families intermarried into this cluster

• 🟢 Sir John Peckham (title unearned — see debunked-myths.md; family itself is real, real Boston 1634/Newport 1638 records)
• 🟢 Edward Richmond
• 🟢 John Babcock

Later generation

• 🟢 Azariah Crandall (b. 1749) — descendant of Elder John Crandall, lived through the Revolutionary era, died in Newport. His daughter Mary Pollyann Crandall m. James Angel — Azariah's Westerly Angell branch connects directly to a documented Greenwich, NJ Tea Burning participant (see reeves-cumberland-nj.md).

Family tree shape

Thomas Angell            Rev. William Wickenden
    (Providence)           (co-accused, 1656)

Rev. Samuel Hubbard   Elder John Crandall   Robert Burdick
        \                    |                  /
         \___ all part of the same 1660s-70s __/
              Westerly Sabbatarian congregation

Rev. Joseph Clarke Sr. ═══ (sister Mary) ═══ Tobias Saunders
   (brother: Dr. John Clarke, RI charter)