Continued
The Norfolk/Hingham Gilmans
As Maine is to United States, so Norfolk is to England. It bulges far out into the North Sea, the old town of Yarmouth on its Eastern extremity. It has always been a fisherman's haven as well as a seaport. Ships may follow on twenty miles up the broad River Yare and anchor at Norwich which was a flourishing seaport eight centuries ago and the oldest manufacturing town in the kingdom. Wool came around the coast in early days from Bristol and other coast towns and the mills of Norwich made it into cloth. It was a likely way for the Bristol Gilmans to have come to Norfolk.
The Earliest Gilman record connected with the Norfolk, England Gilmans, is Geoffrey Gilemyn on a Norwich register about 1310. This is undoubtedly Geoffrey, Keeper of the Canterbury Castle and brother of William, Member of Parliament. There was a Reginall and his wife Cecilia Gilmyn who owned land in Shipham near Caston probably related to him also. Later a Raff (Ralph) dies in the same locality and leaves all of his houses and lands to his cousins. There is no doubt of a close relationship between Ralf and Edward Gilman of Caston but absolute proof is lacking.
With the marriage of Edward Gilman and Rose Rysse at Caston on June 12, 1550, we come at last to an unbroken line of Gilman records down to the present day. He left land and houses to to his four sons, John, Robert, Edward, and Lawrence, and to his five daughters. Unfortunately we cannot trace the posterity of the entire family but the descendants of Robert and Edward have left consecutive records. These two brothers later left Caston and settled in Hingham. Hingham is at least a thousand years old. In 1310 the handsome old church of St. Andrews was built upon the site of an older building. On it's floor are stone tablets to the memory of many Gilmans, each of which bears the family arms and crest.
In a niche on the North wall in the nave of old St. Andrews is a bronze bust of the famous liberator, Abraham Lincoln, with this inscription beneath-"In this parish for many generations lived the Lincolns, to whom, greatest of that lineage, many citizens of the United States of America have erected this memorial in the hope that, for all ages, between that land and this land and all lands, there shall be malice toward none with charity for all.
Few realize that Abraham Lincoln's pedigree goes back to Hingham and to a long line of respected ancestors. The fact that Richard Lincoln was buried in the middle aisle of St. Andrew's is evidence that he was one of the class called "Gentry". He died possessed of a considerable estate but the children of his fourth marriage acquired all of his property except a small amount of land which was granted to his son Edward by the Chancery Court. This Edward Lincoln undoubtedly married Bridget Gilman, sister of Edward Gilman the Emigrant, and their son Thomas, came to America with his aunt Mary Gilman Jacob in 1633 on the ship Bonadventure, settling in Hingham, Massachusetts. He registered on the ship as the nephew of Mrs. Nicholas Jacob, sister of Bridget Gilman Lincoln. Thomas Lincoln was called "the Weaver" and his brother Samuel was the direct ancestor of Abraham Lincoln.
Because of religious dissention which prevailed throughout the kingdom many puritans left for the New World. Among those puritans were Edward Gilman and his family. Five years before this time his sister Mary, her husband Nicholas Jacob, their two children and her nephew Thomas Lincoln had gone to America with Friends and neighbors from Hingham. They settled in a little community near Boston, named Hingham in memory of the home town in England. They arrived on the Ship Diligent on 10 August 1638. With Edward came his wife Mary Clark Gilman, daughters Mary who had just married John Folsom, Lydia who later married Daniel Cushing also a passenger on the Diligent, Sarah who would later marry John Leavitt, a member of a prominent New England family, and sons Edward, John and Moses.
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