Born ‎1612 Delft, South Holland, Netherlands, died ‎30 Jul 1666 Anne Arundel, Colony of Maryland, British Colonial America‎, age 53 or 54 years
Robert Rockhould's birth was most likely in England between 1600 and 1613, then he traveled to the Netherlands and met Sarah Greniffe who became his wife. Many Englishmen left England for the Netherlands during this time due to worsening conditions in their homeland. He was a gunsmith by trade. It is not known the exact time that they arrived in Virginia but their marriage is recorded as taking place in 1633. Their first two children, Mary and Thomas, came by ship, so it is likely that the marriage and the first two births occurred in the Netherlands. This was the time of the earliest settlers in Virginia, not long after Jamestown. Robert was a Puritan who came to the colonies to escape religious persecution and probably the war in England. In 1637 he was a land grantee in Nansemond, Virginia [later known as Suffolk]. Settlers were awarded patents of land, 50 acres for each person whose passage they paid for to the colony . The cost of a ship's passage from England to Virginia was one half a year's salary which was unaffordable for most Englishmen. Robert brought 4 others including his wife, two children, and a probable indentured servant, and received 250 acres. During this time there were several encounters with the Nansemond Indians, who were eventually pushed out of the area. A land patent of another 250 acres was written in 1639 when it appears he sponsored his brother, Thomas, and 4 others to Virginia. In 1649 his land is sold to Richard Bennett (later the governor)[this land becomes Greenberry's Point] and he moves on - he and several others were listed as some of the first settlers about 200 miles away in Providence, Maryland, (later called Annapolis in Anne Arundel County) where they lived on a large plantation called, "Towne Neck". They were again part of a group of non-comformist Puritans who were allowed to move there to escape persecution in Virginia. In 1651 he and another settler, John Scotcher, were granted 400 acres in Calvert County, Md. As a gunsmith, Robert was the armorist for the Trained Band who protected the Puritans in the Battle of the Severn in 1655, called the last battle of the English Revolution.