John Langworthy of Boston

Revised January, 2008

Because the surname Langworthy is fairly unusual, it's likely that the following records all refer to the same man - though it's not certain:

  • John Langworthy was in Boston by 1674, when his name appeared on a list of inhabitants who were not taxpayers, indicating they were lodgers, servants, children, etc.
    (First Report of the Record Commissioners of Boston, p.20)
  • On April 23, 1675, John Langworthy witnessed a settlement of land boundaries in Boston. This implies he was over twenty one, hence born before 1654, so he could not have been a son of Andrew and Rachel (Hubbard) Langworthy of Newport.
    (Seventh Report of the Record Commissioners of Boston, p.94)
  • On April 27, 1675 James Updike, together with other shipwrights, was found guilty of riding John Langworthy on a pole from the north end of Boston to the Town House as an interloper, who had never served his time to the trade of shipwright. James Updike was fined. (Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671 - 1680, Colonial Society of Mass., 2:602,968)

And it's possible that the following also refers to this same John Langworthy:

  • A John Langworthy was at the garrison at Westfield, Massachussetts, July 24, 1676. This is the earliest date for a garrison there, and John was the only person present. (NEH&GR, V43, p.269).

I don't know if John Langworthy of Boston married or left descendants.


The above records are also interesting because they help to resolve some difficulties concerning the birth dates of the children of Andrew and Rachel (Hubbard) Langworthy, of Newport, RI:

  • William Franklin Langworthy, author of The Langworthy Family (1940), seems to have been aware of the Westfield record, but not the Boston records.
  • He therefore assumed that the John Langworthy at the garrison in Westport must have been the son of Andrew and Rachel.
  • But Andrew and Rachel were married in 1658 and Samuel was their oldest son, so WFL assumed that Samuel was born ca 1659 and therefore that John was born ca 1661. This says that John, aged at most 15, went from Rhode Island to be the first and only person in the garrison Westfield, Mass.
  • Cemetery records show that Andrew and Rachel had a child, known only as 'M', who born ca 1660 and died in 1676.

The fact that there was a least one older John Langworthy in Boston during that peroid of time allows us to assert that the John Langworthy of Westfield was probaly not the son of Andrew and Rachel and so allows us to develop a more reasonable set of birth dates for their children.


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