Peter Colman Dr. "Father of the Man" Writer

Such a detail could be construed (by a casual perusal) to be sufficiently deleterious as to cause no slight pang of collective shame for the Colman clan. It cannot be ignored that the arrangement described in the above record had not been the result of some kind of impulse or impetuous action on the part of Thomas and his compatriots. Quite the contrary. Planning and provision for the success of the fledgling enterprise had been undertaken long before departure. Nor can the reader assume that Thomas’s documented ‘neglect’ can be directly attributed to some form of insobriety, or fit of inexplicable incognizance. Nor should one assume that Thomas was indifferent to the considerable loss of both revenue (and his own reputation), which such neglect would have inevitably provoked. We cannot know, nor are there any records to confirm, that Thomas had been able or inclined to contribute the lawful fifty English pounds to the ‘common stock’, which would have thereby granted him the promised two hundred acres of virgin soil in the ‘first division of land’ among these early New England settlers. We do know that he (and others transported to New England “at their own expense’) would have been entitled to fifty acres of land. His lack of cooperation, for whatever reason, could not, then, have been a total loss, notwithstanding the unfortunate loss of numerous livestock which had been committed to his charge, and the apparent disgraceful disintegration of his character.

There are a few surviving signs, a few oxygen-bearing details, a few fresh ‘leaves’ among the scattered remains of silent documents, which may serve to nurture a tiny specimen of hope to nourish the humble legacy of the Colman family. Thomas was not one to lie down. What one can only assume to be a precocious, dissident determination compelled him to seek greener pastures and freer air. Indeed, one small paragraph of the specious, yet spurious account of Thomas’s activities in the Genealogical Dictionary of First Settlers of New England unceremoniously records: “Thomas…was b. in Marlboro, Wiltshire, England in 1602, and three years after settling at Parker River he joined the Rev. Stephen Bachiler in establishing a settlement in “Winicowett” that was later called Hampton. He lived in Hampton less than twenty year.”










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