Robert Barnard

Biography

About 1610–1682

Robert Barnard was a husbandman whose documented connections extended from the Massachusetts mainland to Nantucket, the island south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Hoyt places him at Salisbury, then Andover, where he held a house and lot near Simon Bradstreet and was among the founders of the church in 1645. His wife was Joan or Joanna, identified as Joan Harvey in the Nantucket historical account.

The family later moved to Nantucket. A deed summarized by Hoyt records Robert and Joan, then living on the island, conveying their Andover house and lot to Bradstreet. Their mainland property had remained part of their affairs after the move. Worth’s history places Robert among the island’s early colonial landholders and records his sale of his Nantucket interest to his son John in 1668.

Those colonial interests existed alongside Indigenous land and boundaries. Worth locates the Barnard lots in relation to the mill brook and the Indian boundary, while acknowledging that Robert’s exact house site could no longer be identified.

Robert died in 1682. A residual Andover land interest was still being administered more than thirty years later, when his aging son Stephen asked that the task pass to the next generation.