Later, he and other emigrants from the Massachusetts Bay Colony formed a new township on Long Island which they named Southampton.
[2] Family genealogy says he was ordained in Newark-on-Trent and this is how he chose the name for the New Jersey town he founded later in life.
[1][3] In 1640, Pierson and a party of emigrants from Lynn, Massachusetts formed a new township on Long Island, which they named Southampton.
They united with another body from the township of Wethersfield and formed, under Pierson, a fresh church at a settlement at Branford, within the jurisdiction of the New Haven Colony.
New Haven, rigidly ecclesiastical from the outset, had, like Massachusetts, made church membership a needful condition for the enjoyment of civic rights.
The often repeated claim that she was Abigail Wheelright was proven wrong in Winthrop, Massachusetts by Col. Charles Banks and Mr. Horace Dickerman of New Haven.