Author: Rickett, J. H.
Biography:
RICKETT, John Henry (1808-1874: ancestry.com)
John Henry Rickett was a slippery fellow who changed his religious denomination and his profession as often as he moved about. He was baptized 29 May 1808 at Langtoft, Lincolnshire, the son of John Rickett and his wife, Sarah Gee. As a young adult, he moved frequently, in Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, and Worcestershire. On 11 May 1831 at Preston, Lancashire, he married an illiterate woman, Mary Ann Suddell (1811-1891). Oddly, she later adopted her deceased sister’s name, Cecilia. By the end of his life, he and his wife had lived in England, in Canada (where their youngest child was born), in California (the birthplace of three of their children), in New York (where another child was born), and in New Jersey, New Hampshire, Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Their emigration occurred in Nov. 1833. Though he was not ordained, he described himself in the ship’s manifest as “Clergyman.” In May 1834 he gained employment as pastor at the First Baptist Church, Detroit, where he was “a troubler of Israel,” so that appointment lasted three months. Although on 15 Apr. 1835 he was officially ordained in the Congregationalist church, from June to Oct. 1839 he was a Methodist Episcopalian minister in Brookfield, Massachusetts. In July 1842, he was in Worcester, now a dry goods dealer indicted for fraud. In the 1850s he was in California, in San Franscisco as a preacher and “Vigilante”; then as a gold miner in Grass Valley. Then he was in New Jersey, and then in Wysox, Pennsylvania, where, from Dec. 1860, he was a Presbyterian preacher for several months. For thirteen months starting in 1864, he was a First Reformed pastor at Princeton, New Jersey; then, in 1868 through 1870, he was again a Congregationalist, in Vermont in West Dover and Marlboro, and then in Stoddart, New Hampshire. Now he was a “Patentee” advertising his “Annular Self-acting Wash Boiler” in Scientific American in 1871. In 1872, he assisted the pastor at St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Stockridge, Massachusetts. He officially changed his allegiance one last time. In Aug. 1873, he entered the Episcopal Church as deacon. He died at Stockridge on 21 Jan. 1874. (ancestry.com 6 Feb. 2024; Hartford Courant, 22 July 1842; S. Haskell, First Baptist Church in Detroit [1852], 21; Congregational Ministers in Vermont [1865]; Vermont Chronicle, 30 Aug. 1873; Diocese of Massachusetts [1874], 44; North Adams Transcript, 30 Sept. 1939) JC