vital records sources
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There isn't any good evidence of where John came from before he immigrated to Salem, Massachusetts. It's widely accepted, probably due to one man's mistake in a 1928 publication, that he marred Mary Periam and his children were born in Modbury, Devonshire, England. A View of Devonshire in MDCXXX says that Margery, daughter of John and Margaret (Hone) Periam, married John Sweet of Modbury. We then find publishing his genealogy in 1928 claming that his ancestor John Sweet of Salem married Mary Periam according to The Visitation of Devon in 1620. He was obviously confusing his sources, misquoting them and making a very giant leap of assumption that the two Johns were the same. I see no other reason to connect the Sweets and Periams. The date of There were Sweets in Modbury, but the parish records there have nothing for a John Sweet being baptized, marrying or having children there in the first half of the 17th century. There is even a baptism date claimed for his son James in Modbury - it isn't in the parish records. People publishing their personal genealogies in books and on the internet have repeated mistakes and elaborated on them with more so that the Sweet family history in that century has become a nonsensical beast. The reason John Sweet of Modbury is mentioned in the 1845 book is due to his marriage into the Periam family, which was high in the ranks of landed gentry. Margery Periam's father was the mayor of Exeter. Margery had a sister Mary who married, so "Margery" is not a confusion with "Mary." Researchers looking for English origins of American families find references to people with the right names in books on the nobility and gentry of England. Genealogical publications in England before the 1900s focused on royalty, nobility and landed gentry. Parish records were published gradually, but it wasn't until the later 1900s that they became widely available on microfilm and then on the internet. Even with this considered, not all parish records are available on the internet and many aren't indexed. John Sweet, the immigrant, could have come from one of thousands of towns in England. None of the indexes to parish records show a probable Sweet family there that fits with the immigrant family, so they likely came from a town for which the parish records for that period no longer exist (this isn't uncommon, including the transcripts that were sent to the archbishops), are too badly damaged to read or haven't yet been indexed.

     

Children of James and Mary Sweet:

James

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