Smith341 did much of the original research on this family and its connections. He reports (p. 173) that Edmund Browne’s wife “Mary Cramphorne was aunt to another Mary Cramphorne, who married William Heath of Ware, Hertfordshire, and later of Roxbury, MA, making a cluster of Browne and Heath first cousins among the early immigrants to Massachusetts Bay.

“The identification of this family as that of the New England immigrants is also based upon the children’s associations in Watertown and Boston and their connection to William Colbron. Of this couple’s four known immigrant children, son Edmund Browne and daughter Anne Browne’s husband Matthew Ines, were servants of Mr. William Colbron, who was of South Weald and Little Harley, Essex, England. William Colbron was married to Margery Huxton on 22 October 1618 in nearby Childerditch, the same parish in which son Abraham Brown’s first marriage and the baptisms of three of his children were recorded. South Weald itself, held the burial records of Abraham’s first wife and the only one of the three children baptized in Childerditch who did not appear in New England. Sons Abraham and John Browne of Watertown arrived along with many other Essex immigrants. While John left no records aside from his baptism in England, it was his land that Abraham Browne succeeded to in Watertown (vide post).

“On January 1672[/3], Jonathan2 Browne of Watertown and Mary his wife, sold rights to land in Boston in which he called himself ‘cousin and next heir’ of his ‘uncle’ Edmund Browne (Suffolk Deed 8:43-4 & vide post), confirming that the immigrants Edmund and Abraham Browne were brothers.

“In view of this evidence, speculations by Bond in the mid-1800s based on the work of Horatio Somerby regarding the Hawkendon origin of this family were clearly mistaken.”