I keep seeing 1639 in Massachusetts Bay cited as the first notary commission in the colonies — true, or is there an earlier record? I’ve also seen references to a Dutch notary in New Amsterdam around 1653, so which one counts as the “first,” and what source nails it down?
Earliest English-colony notary I can document is William Aspinwall, commissioned “Notary & Tabellion Publick” in Mass. Bay on Sept. 19, 1644; see his record here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Aspinwall_(New_England). For New Amsterdam, Dirck van Schelluyn shows up as notary by 1653 in Fernow’s Notarial Records of New Amsterdam — if you’ve got a solid 1639 Mass cite, I’d love the page number, because paper trail beats rumor.
If you count Spanish colonies, St. Augustine had escribanos in the 1560s; check Archivo General de Indias — ‘1639’ is English-only, @notebook_traveler.
I’ve seen the “1639” too, but in Shurtleff’s Records it reads like an “order that there shall be a notary,” while the first clear commission is entered Sept. 19, 1644 in vol. 2. What helped me was opening the digitized volumes and just Ctrl+F “notary” to catch both entries.