Dea. Daniel Brainerd

1641-1715

Born 1641

Died 1715

Children include Elijah

Daniel Brainerd was one of the first settlers of Haddam, Connecticut, a town on the Connecticut River below Middletown. He was born about 1641, since his gravestone gives his age as seventy four in April 1715. A family tradition says he came to New England at about eight and grew up in the Wadsworth or Wyllis household at Hartford. The compiler of the 1908 Brainerd genealogy says himself that it is unproved.

About 1663 or 1664 he married Hannah Spencer. She had been born at Lynn in Massachusetts about 1641, a daughter of Gerrard Spencer, who also settled at Haddam in those years. They had seven sons, Daniel, James, Joshua, William, Caleb, Elijah and Hezekiah, and a daughter, Hannah, who married Thomas Gates. Hannah died before 1691, or about then.

He was a deacon of the Haddam church. From 1692 he sat as a deputy to the General Court, the colony's legislature, which met at Hartford and New Haven. The colony's records show him at its sessions of May, June and October 1692, May, September and October 1693, February 1693/4, May and October 1695, and later.

On 30 March 1693 he married Elizabeth (Wakeman) Arnold, a widow. On 29 November 1698 he married a second Hannah Spencer, then the widow of George Sexton.

He died on 1 April 1715. The inventory was taken on 19 April by Nathaniel Spencer, Gerrard Spencer and Joseph Arnold, and came to 834 pounds 10 shillings and threepence. His will was not clear enough to divide it. On 2 May his children wrote their own agreement, beginning: "Our father's will not being so full and clear as we could wish." They had first come "to a loving agreement with our hond. mother-in-law, Hannah Brainard," his widow.

His headstone at Haddam reads: "Here Lyeth the Body of Deacon Daniel Brainerd Aged 74 Years Who Died April 1st 1715." The original brownstone still stands, worn but legible, and a granite copy cut with the same words stands beside it.

Children

Elijah Brainerd 1678-1740

Sources

Charles William Manwaring, A Digest of Early Connecticut Probate Records, vol. II (1904), archive.org digestofearlycon02manw, pp. 160-161

Lucy Abigail Brainard, The Genealogy of the Brainerd-Brainard Family in America (1908), vol. 1, p. 32, archive.org genealogyofbrain01brai

Find a Grave memorial 47491853, Deacon Daniel Brainerd, Haddam, Connecticut

Charles William Manwaring, A Digest of the Early Connecticut Probate Records, vol. I (1904), archive.org digestofearlycon01manw, p. 363, leaf n400, from Hartford probate records vol. IV p. 225

Charles William Manwaring, A Digest of the Early Connecticut Probate Records, vol. I (1904), archive.org digestofearlycon01manw, p. 364, leaf n401, from Hartford probate records vol. IV pp. 99-100 and 225

The Genealogy of the Brainerd-Brainard Family in America (1908), volume 2, archive.org genealogyofbrain02brai; Lucy Abigail Brainard, The Genealogy of the Brainerd-Brainard Family in America (1908), vol. 1, p. 32, archive.org genealogyofbrain01brai; Charles William Manwaring, A Digest of Early Connecticut Probate Records, vol. II (1904), archive.org digestofearlycon02manw, pp. 160-161; Find a Grave memorial 47491853

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Cite: Heirology, "Dea. Daniel Brainerd (1641-1715)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/dea-daniel-brainerd-1641-1715-eb4207.