So every once in a while Ancestry sends out an e-mail about possible hints for people in my online family tree. I got one a while back which pointed me to “pictures” other people had posted to their trees. I put the word pictures in quotes because they weren’t all what you would typically think of as pictures. Some were pages that were copied out of books. So I searched online for the whole books and found them and downloaded digital copies of them. But I also then purchased them on Amazon because when you are trying to add people to your tree you often are going back and forth between generations and it’s so much easier with a physical book then trying to do that with a computer file.
The two books that I found were Ecclesiastical and Other Sketches of Southington, Conn and The Stanley Families of America. The books contained info on the Hart, Stanley, and Porter lines in addition to the Cowles family who I wrote about in a previous blog post.
I knew from the Cowles book that Sarah Cowles had married Stephen Hart. They were one of my husband’s sets of 7 times great-grandparents. I also realized that I had Sarah in my tree twice, once as her parents’ daughter because my husband is descended from Samuel Cowles and Abigail Stanley, and once with her husband because my husband is descended from their daughter Abigail Hart. Abigail Hart’s daughter, Abigail Cole, married John Cowles, who was the grandson of Sarah’s brother Samuel Cowles. That all makes perfect sense right? Yeah, not to me either. I had to create the chart below to help figure it all out. Turns out the parents of Asenath Cowles were second cousins on the Cowles line. Asenath was the wife of Miles Cooper, who I wrote about in a blog post several months ago.
AND Asenath’s parents were also each other’s third cousins on the Hart line. See chart below.
Then I discovered another book, A Genealogy of the Descendants of Richard Porter. I didn’t buy that book because it wasn’t really about this branch of the Porter family, although it did mention a few things about the Porter brothers, Thomas, Robert, and Daniel. Turns out the Asenath’s grandparents, John Cowles and Mary Porter were also second cousins.
Thank goodness Miles and Asenath moved to the northwestern part of New York state and their son George married Roxina Doxtater to get some German DNA to mix in with all the English DNA of people marrying their cousins! You should see how confusing our online tree looks now that I have all of these people in it; lines going all over the place!
So to get back to the title of this blog post, the Steven Hart at the top of the second chart above is the man after whom Hartford, Connecticut was supposedly named. According to the Ecclesiastical and Other Sketches of Southington, Conn book, he was supposed to have come from Braintree, Essex County, England. The company he came with first settled in Braintree, Massachusetts. He then moved to Newtown (which is what present day Cambridge, Mass was called at the time). He “constituted the church of which Rev Thomas Hooker was invited from England to become their pastor”. I assume “constituted” means he founded the church. He was in Cambridge in 1632 and was admitted a freeman there on May 14, 1634. He went to Hartford in 1635 with Mr. Hooker’s company and was one of the original proprietors there. There is a tradition that the town was named for a ford he discovered and used when crossing the Connecticut River at a low stage of the water. So from Hart’s Ford the name transitioned into Hartford. I have however seen a picture online of a plaque at the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, CT that states that the town was named after Hertford, England. Hertford is about 37 miles from Braintree where Stephen Hart was supposed to have come from, so who knows.
The Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, CT is another place we need to go visit, theancientburyingground.org. Some of my husband’s ancestors are buried there including Timothy Stanley. He died in 1648 and his grave is listed as the oldest one in the cemetery. Timothy was the father of Abigail Stanley who married Samuel Cowles listed in the first chart above. Samuel’s mother Hannah is also buried there.
The Stanley, Hart, Porter family trees can be found here https://myfamgen.com/stanley-hart-porter-families/.