Will holds 'vital' historical clues

[Adsos Letter]

SOURCE: The Gazette
By RANDY BOSWELL, Canwest News Service

A sleuthing family history buff has discovered the 17th-century will of a Newfoundland man who appears to have been part of the first English colony in Canada.

The 335-year-old document details the planned distribution of property belonging to a "Master James Hill, inhabitant of Cupits Cove" - present-day Cupids, the historic Newfoundland town where Prince Charles and Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently marked the upcoming 400th anniversary of Canada's earliest English settlement. The document dated March 4, 1674 is held in Britain's National Archives and provides "vital new information" about the trailblazing Cupids colony, said Newfoundland archeologist Bill Gilbert.

"Although we know the names of quite a few of the earliest settlers, we could not say with any degree of certainty who the people were who continued to live there after the first 10 or 15 years," he said. "Now one of those settlers has emerged from the shadows."

The document stipulates that Hill - who appears to be the same man mentioned as early as 1616 in other Cupids documents, and may have been 80 by the time the will was written - wanted to bequeath to a Thomas Butler of the nearby "Porta Grave" community "all my Goods within and about the said house of Cupits Cove."

LINK: http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/Will+holds+vital+historical+clues/2306295/story.html

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