Thomas Hosmer, Hartford Founder

Compiled by Timothy Lester Jacobs, SDFH Genealogist

THOMAS¹ HOSMER, HARTFORD FOUNDER (STEPHEN^A) was baptized. 02 Jan 1602/03 in Hawkhurst, Kent, England, and died 12 Apr 1687 in Northampton, MA. He married (1) FRANCES ______ bef. 1636 in prob Cambridge, MA. She was born abt. 1602 in England, and died 15 Feb 1675/76 in Hartford, CT. He married (2) KATHERINE HOSKINS?, WIDOW OF DAVID WILTON 06 May 1679 in Hartford, CT. She died aft. 07 Feb 1685/86 in prob Northampton, MA (in 2nd husband’s will).

Thomas Hosmer came from Hawkhurst, Kent, England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1633, first residing in Cambridge, where he was made freeman 6 May 1635 and was selectman 23 November 1635. In the Cambridge land inventory of 10 October 1635 he held five parcels. It is unclear when he removed to Hartford, and may have not gone down with the main party, but was there by 6 June 1637.

In the Hartford land inventory of February 1639/40 he held five parcels granted to him: his house lot on which his dwelling house stood with other outhouses, yards and gardens of an extraordinarily large forty-one acres of meadow and upland, certainly one of the largest house plots in Hartford, located on the east side of the road from William Hills’s to the Oxpasture, being the southern-most house lot in Hartford; also two acres in the South Meadow; fourteen acres in the Forty Acres; ten acres lying in Hockanum; and six acres and three roods in the swamp by the Great River. By the late 1670s his land holdings totaled six hundred ninety-one acres. But soon after he sold it all, and in 1679 bought 90 acres in the undeveloped “west division” of Hartford, which would ultimately become the town of West Hartford in 1854.

He had removed to Farmington at some undetermined time, as he was there to be on a list of freeman of that town 12 October 1669. But later moved back to Hartford.

He was on the Connecticut jury in 1641 to 1648, 1653, 1654, 1655 to 1567, 1659, 1660, and, 1662. He was Hartford Constable in 1639 and 1663. In 1643 and 1647 he was elected as selectman of Hartford.

He was in Northampton, Massachusetts at the time of his death, perhaps living with or visiting his eldest daughter Clemence and her husband Jonathan Hunt and their children. He died 12 April 1687.

Genealogy: “The Hosmer Heritage: Ancestors and Descendants of the Immigrant Thomas Hosmer”, Ronald L. Roberts, South Lake Tahoe, CA, 1984