390 Years Ago In 1629...

​Ninth in a series of biographical sketches on Burgesses whose descendants belong to the First Mississippi Company; in honor of the 400th anniversary of the July 30, 1619, meeting of the first representative governmental body in American at the 1617 Church on Jamestown Island

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Cheney Boyce was elected as a Burgess to represent Shirley Hundred in 1629.  Who was this man?
 
Cheney Boyce, born in 1586 in England, first came to the Virginia Colony before 1616 and survived the Indian massacre of 1622.  Some authorities suggest that Cheney's first wife, Sarah, was captured during the Indian raid; others, however, disregard this idea. Cheney is found in John Throgmorton’s Muster of the inhabitants of West and Shirley Hundred taken on 22 January 1624.  Cheney is listed as a single man, aged 26 years, who arrived on the George.
 
Cheney served as Burgess for Shirley Hundred Island in 1629, 1630, and 1632.  He married a woman whose first name was Joyce about 1635; their one known child was Thomas Boyce whose testimony stating that he is the only son of Cheney Boyce appeared in the Charles City County Court Order of 1655-1665, p. 355.
 
Cheney was designated as an "Ancient Planter" in the land grant he received for 1550 acres including the 100-acre bequest for being a settler before the time of Sir Thomas Dale.   Boyce was responsible for importing 29 persons, according to Nell  Nugent's  Cavaliers and Pioneers   p. 24.   
 
In August 1637, Boyce received another grant on Merchants' Hope Creek in Charles City County.  The final land patent was dated 1 September 1643, when he received an additional 1,198 acres of land.  The date of Cheney's death was after 1643 and well before 26 Oct 1649, when Cheney’s widow, Joyce, was described as being the widow of Richard Tye, her second husband. 
Thomas Boyce's records from the court primarily deal with property due him from his father's estate.  Thomas petitioned the court to gain control of his father’s land, which, at Cheney’s death, had become the property of his mother, Joyce, and her second husband, Richard Tye. Joyce Boyce Tye apparently married a third time Dr. John Cogan.  Several records establish a relationship between Cheney and Joyce Boyce and their daughter-in-law Emelia Boyce, wife of son Thomas.  Emelia Boyce also obtained property from her grandfather, Richard Craven, another qualifying ancestor of the Jamestowne Society.
 
First Mississippi Company Descendants of Cheney Boyce: Azalia Smith Francis Moore and Steven Merril Smith
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