Websters of Rockingham, New Hampshire
 

My sister and I have a lot of DNA matches with Websters of Rockingham, New Hampshire as early settlers.

I'm wondering if these are relevant to our Websters or whether it's a family to whom everyone is related :d

Would any of you have the time to check if this family appears on any of your matches trees, please.

Many thanks

17 of them in my DNA matches.

Sue, I still keep a sub to American Ancestors. Searching Webster in Rockingham, NH, I found a wealth of hits:
Census, Tax and Voter Lists (8233)
Vital Records (incl. Bible, Cemetery, Church and SSDI) (4910)
Military Records (468)
Genealogies, Biographies, Heraldry, and Local Histories (31)
Journals and Periodicals (23)
Court, Land and Probate Records (2)

I think Rockingham is in fact a county of the state of New Hampshire. I could not find any city, town or village by the name of Rockingham there.

Perhaps most useful for you right now, I see there are genealogies online such as these.

JOHN WEBSTER. The Fifth Colonial Governor of Connecticut
"John Webster and his wife Agnes came to this country from Warwickshire, England, in the Spring of the year 1635, and settled at Cambridge, Mass." 32 pages.

The New England historical and genealogical register
by Waters, Henry F. (Henry Fritz-Gilbert).
See pages 159-160 in this volume, but there are many others. Volumes 1-77 cover 1847-1923. This section on "The Webster Family" is just one hit I got.

There are probably plenty more, and I would expect most or all to be available free online at archive.org. You could have a poke around.

I would love to stay and poke with you, but I have got to get ready and go out to a medical appointment. Good luck!

I, my cousin, sib's child, best mate and my Jewish friend ALL have DNA matches that include Websters of Rockingham county.

Thanks all for taking the time to look.

It seems,, as I rather feared, that these Websters are a family that spread far and wide. As Janet states most of these other trees have an English ancestor born in either Warwickshire or Norfolk and as my earliest Webster ancestor was born 1680ish probably in Cumberland, I doubt that there is a connection. I will have a poke around the websites posted by Janet, just in case :d

Thanks again

Once anyone finds those "came over with the Mayflower" ancestors they amass huge trees, which they all copy from each other. I suspect my links may be via poor ag labs who travelled steerage that the families have airbrushed out of their histories.

I often wonder how certain these tree owners are that their ancestors are those early settlers! I suspect that a shaky knowledge of UK geography may play a part in some of the potential fantasies - after all to an American used to wide open spaces with ancestors that emigrated across an ocean and continent the distance between Warwickshire and Cumberland doesn't seem that great and have decided that their Websters must be the family that went on to become important in New Hampshire. Never mind that the name is incredibly common and they could have come from anywhere in the UK!

So true, Sue. I don't know how long it took me to twig that I should usually not be casting my eyes farther than 5 or 10 miles from the ancestral village. I got a lot farther as soon as I stopped going so far!

My mother's birth is placed in Leeds, Kent on a number of trees by people who should know better when in fact she is a Leedsloiner, proudly Yorkshire-born. Modern computer methods don't help in this case, with Ancestry eagerly offering a pop-up menu of wrong choices.

That's why I think sometimes the older genealogy books are more helpful; a century or two closer to the events in question and vetted for publication. I recently went to the book (published 1870) owned by my grandfather (b. 1848) and was impressed with how much confirmation popped right up online. There was a minor error in one twig's birthplace (born before, not after, the family moved), and that was corrected in the margin in my grandfather's own handwriting. Another advantage of a hard-copy book.