4th of July, Genealogy Style

The Declaration of Independence
See the bottom there? Some of our distant relatives signed that.

Fifty-six white men from the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. Did you ever wonder: who were they, and are we related to any of them? Well, wonder no more. We are not direct descendants of any of the signers, but we have a more distant relationships to at least two:*

Lyman Hall, representative of Georgia. Born in Connecticut, he moved south and lived in South Carolina and Georgia after studying medicine at Yale. His property was burned by the British during the war, and he was accused of high treason. He escaped back to Connecticut, returning to Georgia after the war to serve as governor. He is a third cousin (multiple times removed) from the Kinney line, through our mutual descent from John Walker, one of the early colonizers of Connecticut. Lyman was the great-grandson of John's daughter, Hannah Walker Hall. The Kinneys descended from her sister, Mary Walker Brown Clark.

Robert Treat Paine, representative of Massachusetts. Lawyer, prosecutor (among other jobs, he was assistant prosecutor in the trial of British soldiers for the Boston Massacre), founder of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts attorney general and supreme court judge. He is a third cousin (many times removed) through our common descent from Nicholas Snow and his wife Constance Hopkins, both Mayflower passengers. Robert was the great-grandson of Nicholas's daughter, Mary Snow Paine. Our Kinney line is descended from Nicholas's son, Stephen, named for his mother's father, Stephen Hopkins, another Mayflower passenger.

The 4th of July is also a good day to remind you of the many Revolutionary War soldiers in our family.

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*Note, as with many people of English ancestry, we have certain "gateway ancestors" who connect us back to medieval times. I am not counting relationships through those gateway ancestors here, only closer connections. Also, I'm relying on wikitree.com relationship finder, which is only as good as the family trees that have been entered into its system. There may be relationships that it is not finding because the trees are not complete. I wouldn't be surprised, for example, if we are relatives of Josiah Bartlett, since we are descendants from one Bartlett family in Massachusetts, but wikitree finds no connection.