May not Thomas Read, of Salem, have been a son of Colonel Read, of Maldon in Essex, and a brother of the wife of the younger Winthrop?  Peters says, in the “Last Legacy,” “Many of my acquaintances, going for New England, had engaged me to come to them when they sent, which accordingly I did.”  Thomas Read came over some time before him; so did John Winthrop, Jr., and wife.  They were the same as children to him.  They sent for him, and he came.  After it was ascertained and determined that Peters should settle in Salem, Read joined the church here, and became a full inhabitant.  Peters located his grant of land in sight of Read’s residence, on the next then unappropriated territory, at a distance of about two and a half miles.  When Read returned to England, he left his property here in the care of the Winthrops.  Wait Winthrop, as the agent and attorney of his heirs, sold it to Daniel Eppes.  If, as I conjecture, Thomas Read was a son of Colonel Read, of Essex, his coming here with Peters, and his connection with the Winthrops, are accounted for.  His strong predilection for military affairs was natural in a son of a colonel of the English army.  It led him back to the mother-country, on the first sound of the great civil war reaching these shores, and raised him to the rank he finally attained.  The conjecture that he was a brother of the wife of the younger Winthrop is favored by the fact, that her son, Fitz John Winthrop, was a captain in Read’s regiment, at the time of the restoration of the Stuarts.

During the short period of the residence of Hugh Peters in America, professional duties, and the extent to which his great talents were called upon in ecclesiastical and political affairs, in all parts of the colony, left him but little opportunity to attend to his two-hundred-acre grant.  It was to the north of the present village of Danvers Plains, on the eastern side and adjoining to Frost-Fish Brook.  The history of this grant confirms the supposition of his particular connection with the family of the younger Winthrop.  It seems that it had not been formally laid out by metes and bounds while Peters was here.  Owing to this circumstance, perhaps, it escaped confiscation at the time of his condemnation and execution.  Some years afterwards, June 4, 1674, a committee of the town laid out the grant “to Mr. Peters.”  The record of this transaction says, “The land is in the possession of John Corwin.”  Captain John Corwin had married, in May, 1665, Margaret, daughter of John Winthrop, Jr.  She survived her husband, and sold the same land, May 22, 1693, to “Henry Brown, Jr., of Salisbury, yeoman.”  These facts show that this portion of Mr. Peters’s lands did go, according to the agreement when he left America, to the family of John Winthrop, Jr.