Hart, John, 1684 - 1753

John Hart was born in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1684 (bap. Nov. 27, 1686), the son of Capt. John and Mary Hart. On March 20, 1706, he married Esther Gridley, the daughter of the trader Samuel Gridley, and both were admitted members of the church at Farmington on Jan. 31, 1712. Hart was chosen deacon of the Farmington church on Nov. 19, 1718. He was town clerk and elected twenty-three times representative from Farmington to the Connecticut General Court between the years 1717 and 1743. In the Tunxis Indian petition to the Connecticut General Court in 1738, he and other Farmington residents were accused of encroaching on Indian land. Shortly after his wife died on July 10, 1743, he married the widow Hannah Hull (m. Jan 11, 1744) and died in Kensington on Oct. 7, 1753, where he was also a deacon of the church. William Richard Cutter, Genealogical and Family History of Central New York : A Record of the Achievements of Her People in the Making of a Commonwealth and the Building of a Nation (3 vols., New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1912), vol. 1, 486-7; Charles Barney Whittelsey, Genealogy of the Whittelsey-Whittlesey Family (Hartford, Conn: C. B. Whittelsey, Press of the Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1898), 198.