I'm working on Hoyt families right now. I have Hoyts that settled in Fairfield county, Connecticut, but I'm looking at my mother-in-law's family, Hoyts that settled in Salisbury/Amesbury, Massachusetts. I was amused to find a Dorothie Hoyt, daughter of John Hoyt and his second wife, Frances (the first wife was also Frances). Besides her birth record, there is not much other information about her excepting a legal case when she was 21 years old. Apparently, Dorothy dressed up in male clothes and was hauled into court.
Her father was there and agreed that she had "ye fact comitted". The court ordered that she be apprehended and whipped unless her father paid forty shillings in corn or money at once. This seems to me to be somewhat excessive. It is unknown what happened next as there is no further record of this intrepid ancestress, except that both her brother and father were jurors at the Court session in Hampton where this took place.
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