John Edmund Needham

John Edmund Needham, born about the year 1575 in Hampstead, Middlesex, England, and departed this life on the sixteenth of May, 1677, at Lynn, in Essex County of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, stands among the earliest forebears of the compiler's paternal-grandmother line to set foot upon the soil of the New World. He was, by reckoning of the present generations, an eleven-times great-grandfather of the compiler.

His origins lay in the parish of Hampstead, then a village set upon the heights north of London, of modest size and rural character in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign. The England of his youth was a land in religious ferment, a circumstance which moved many of his contemporaries to seek refuge across the Atlantic in the decades that followed. Whether John Edmund Needham came to New England in the great Puritan migration of the 1630s or in a later passage, the records here preserved do not specify; it is certain only that he was at Lynn, Essex County, by the close of his long life.

He was united in marriage to Joan Leazing — her name appearing variously in early records as Joane or Jone, and her surname as Leasing — and of this union there is preserved the name of a son, Daniel Nathaniel Needham, born in 1638 and surviving until 1717. Through Daniel the line was carried forward into succeeding American generations.

Lynn, where John Edmund Needham's days closed, was among the earliest seated towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, settled in the 1630s and known in that century for its tanneries and shoemaking trades, set along the shore north of Boston. To have lived to the year 1677, attaining an age near one hundred and two by the dates here recorded, was a remarkable span by any measure of that age, and bespeaks an extraordinary constitution.

John Edmund Needham was the compiler's eleven-times great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother line.