The Wright way

In 1100 Norwich was a major metropolis, rivalling London in importance. It was still significant though diminished in 1600. Today its name is synonymous with boondocks.

Nicholas Wright and Margaret Nelson, living in Norwich in the second half of the 1500s, had five sons. In 1636 three of them, Peter, Anthony, and Nicholas, emigrated to Massachusetts, to seed communities a few miles north of Boston. Were they Puritans? Probably.

Norwich is in a section of England called East Anglia. Sixty percent of the English settlers in Massachusetts came from there. If you toured East Anglia today looking only at place names you’d think you were in Massachusetts: Lynn, Newton, Hingham, Woburn, Medford, Dorchester, Weymouth, and, of course, Boston. They came for one reason—to set up what they believed would be ideal communities adhering to the Puritan way. Between 1630 and 1640 more than 20,000 Puritans crossed the North Atlantic to settle in Massachusetts.

So the Wrights likely were Puritans, but it seems that they didn’t stay Puritans for long. A few years after they landed in Lynn, the brothers moved to Sandwich on Cape Cod and then to Oyster Bay, Long Island. There they became involved in an active Quaker community that is still a source of great local pride. They probably joined the Society of Friends some time in the 1660s. George Fox, founder of the Friends, began proselytizing in England in 1647, ten years after the Wrights left. But his message spread quickly and leapt the ocean. By the time Fox traveled to the New World, there were several Quaker communities here to meet with. In May of 1672 he spent several days with Quakers in Oyster Bay.

Why do we care? Peter Wright, one of the three brothers, married and had seven children, one of whom, Gideon, is a direct ancestor of Mabel Muldrow. But the story gets really interesting with Gideon’s sisters, our multi-great aunts.