JOHN EVELEIGH

SILVESTER EVELEIGH

JOSEPH EVELETH

ISAAC EVELETH

ISAAC EVELETH Jr.

NATHANIEL EVELETH

ISAAC EVELETH

ISAAC EVELETH, Jr.

EZEKIEL EVELETH

GEORGE SIMONDS EVELETH

GEORGE SIMONDS EVELETH Jr.

JASON HAUPT EVELETH

JASON SCOTT EVELETH

The Eveleths of America all trace their descent from one Silvester Eveleigh or Eveleth, who immigrated to Massachusetts about the year 1640 with a wife and several children, but until recently his origin has been a mystery. We find the name in the early decades spelled alternately as Evylith, Evelleth and Evely; however, Silvester himself seems to have consistently signed his name Eveleigh, and it is to that Devon family that we have traced his ancestry.

The various branches of the Eveleths preserve several traditions of their origin. The elder, Princeton, line did not connect their ancestor, John, grandson of Silvester, with the latter at all in their preserved traditions, although the connection can be easily documented. Among the descendants of James, John’s youngest brother, we find variously reported two, three, or four immigrating Eveleth brothers of Huguenot ancestry. Another descendent, Sheriff Joseph Eveleth⁶ stated that the family stemmed from four brothers: James, Joseph, John and Isaac, in a memorandum written about 1845. There are similar traditions among the descendants of Isaac³: Mrs. Doris (Eveleth) Fowler¹⁰ says that "my father told me there were two brothers came over from England together…. Sylvester came to Boston, then Gloucester." One of the few traditions of the Eveleth’s English home was reported by Perkins Eveleth⁶ who stated that, "Sylvester came from London and Wiltshire, where his parents were entombed…"

Upon this slim basis many erroneous conjectures have been made. Rev. Charles Healey Eveleth, who published several pamphlets on the family history at the start of this century, first attempted to explain the stories of the Eveleth brothers by making "James Everill or Webb" of Boston (1600-1682) Silvester’s brother. There was in fact no such person, as this is a confusion of James Everill with John Evered alias Webb, neither of whom seems to have been at all related to Silvester. If we take into account the names of the Eveleth brothers given in Sheriff Joseph’s account, it seems more likely that the family remembers the sons of Joseph² as the "founding" Eveleths, and that the initial generations have been collapsed and confused by time and memory. Indeed, all documentary evidence points to Silvester alone as the immigrant ancestor.

As to Silvester’s ancestry, there are again numerous conflicting accounts. Rev. Charles H. Eveleth wrote one manuscript connecting Silvester to the famous Evelyn family of Wiltshire, but this tenuous link, denied by the Evelyn Genealogy, was based more on wish than fact. A more serious attempt, now disproven, was made by Neal F. Mears in A History of the Heverly Family (Chicago, 1945), which traces the rather obscure descent of American Heverlys from Charles Eveleigh (1575-1654/5), son of John Evelegh, MP for Tavistock in 1664, recorded in the 1564 Devon Visitation. That line may be acceptable, but Mears goes further, drawing on the legends of Silvester’s brothers, and proposes that he was the son of Charles Eveleigh by his first wife, whom he calls Mary Sylvester. However, we have now been able to disprove all these conjectural lines, having the baptismal and marriage records of Silvester, which show him to have been baptized in the parish of Exeter St. Thomas, Devon on 16 Feb., 1603/4, son of John and Jane Eveleigh.

The name Eveleigh or Evelegh is a Devon place name, specifically a manor near Broadclyst, east of Exeter. The name has been taken to refer to a grove (-leigh); either Ivo’s (a Norman name), or Ever’s (boar’s), or perhaps an even or level grove. It is first mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086), where it is spelled Iveligh, and was for many years the property of the Dukes of Lancaster, generally under the spelling Yevelegh. The family were numerous in the immediate area, obviously taking their surname from the place name. Accounts of the elder branch of the Eveleigh family are given in the Devon visitation of 1564, and in Burke’s Landed Gentry, which traces the family to a John Evelegh of West Evelegh and Westcote, born about 1480. The arms were: Per pale or and sable a chevron between three griffons passant countercharged. (It must be noted that there is no evidence that Silvester Eveleth’s descendants are entitled to bear these arms, as his relation to John Evelegh of West Evelegh is not known.) Eveleighs were quite numerous in South-east Devon by 1600, and many of their wills were preserved at Exeter, where they were sadly destroyed by German bombing during World War II. Before this, the family is sometimes rumored to have come from Wiltshire. The place name occurs usually as Everley in Wiltshire, and a Bosco de Eurlay appears there in the Pipe Rolls of 1166.