New England Family. John, a clergyman, born at Roxbury, MA, on the 19th of December 1664; graduated at Harvard, 1683. He was ordained a minister in 1688, and settled at Deerfield, where he was living at the time of the noted Deerfield massacre, February 28, 1704, when two of his children were killed and he himself, with the rest of his family, taken captive and forced to march to Canada. Released in 1706, he returned to his charge in Deerfield and remained there, publishing a number of sermons and a narrative of his captivity, The Redeemed Captive (1707). He died in Deerfield, MA, on the 12th of June 1729.—His first cousin, William’s son, Elisha, a clergyman, born at Hatfield, MA, on the 24th of August 1694; graduated at Harvard in 1711; studied law and settled at Wethersfield, CT; was for several years a member of the state general assembly and clerk of that body. Ordained to the ministry in 1721, he preached at Wethersfield till 1726, when he became president of Yale College, serving in that capacity till 1839. He again represented Wethersfield in the legislature; was chosen a justice of the superior court; went to Cape Breton as chaplain of the Connecticut troops in 1745, and in 1746 was appointed colonel of the regiment of one thousand men, raised in Connecticut, for the expedition planned against Canada. He died at Wethersfield on the 24th of July 1755.—His great-grandnephew, William, a legislator, born at Lebanon, CT, on the 18th of April 1731; graduated at Harvard in 1747; studied theology with his father for a year, and went with his relative, Col. Ephraim Williams, on his Lake George expedition of 1757. Beginning in 1756, he was town clerk of Lebanon for forty-five years, a member of the assembly for over fifty years, and for many years speaker. He was colonel of the Twelfth Regiment of militia from 1773 to 1776, in the latter year accepting a seat in Congress, where he was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was for forty years judge of the Windham County court and judge of probate for Windham district. In 1787 he was a member of the Connecticut convention held to ratify the Constitution of the United States. He died at Lebanon on the 2nd of August 1811.—John’s great-great-grandson, Eleazer, a missionary, born at Caughnawaga, NY, about 1787; educated at Longmeadow, MA, and by the Rev. Enoch Hale, at Westhampton, MA; served in the War of 1812, and became a Protestant Episcopal missionary to the Oneida Indians, removing with them to Green Bay, WI, in 1820. A claim was at one time made that he was the son of Louis XVI., and a story circulated, narrating a rescue from prison, a lapse of memory, and other romantic details. He was an authority on Indian manners, customs and history, and was the author of A Spelling-Book in the Language of the Seven Iroquois Nations (1813); and translated into Iroquois The Book of Common Prayer (1853). He died at Hoganstown, NY, on the 28th of August 1858.—Another member of the family, Ephraim, a soldier, born at Newton, MA, on the 24th of February 1715; early in life a sailor, he joined the army to serve in Canada against the French, in 1740. On the renewal of the French war in 1755, he led a regiment of Massachusetts troops to join Sir William Johnson, then on his way to invade Canada, and made his will while on the march, leaving all his property to found a “Free School” at Williams’s Town (Williams College), where land had been granted him by the Massachusetts government in 1750. He was killed in an ambuscade of French and Indians near the head of Lake George on the 8th of September 1755.
