John Potter
John Potter was one of the first planters of New Haven and he died there in 1643, five years after the town was laid out. He left a widow and three young children.
The list of persons and estates taken at New Haven that year rates a John Potter with four in his family and an estate of twenty five pounds. It is a modest line on a page where the governor is rated at three thousand. A widow Potter stands a little above him on the same list with two in her family and thirty pounds.
Three years after his death his widow had taken Edward Parker, and on 7 July 1646 the two of them came before the governor, the deputy governor and a magistrate to hand back what was not theirs. The court entered it in a single sentence. They desired "to invest Jn[o] Potters two sons in the right of their fathers land & howse," and declared themselves willing "to bestow a hejfer of a yeare old on Hannah, & deliuer it presently for her vse, & so to be improved as a stock for her." A particular writing signed by both of them was left in the secretary's hands.
That entry is the only place his three children stand together. The two sons are John, born about 1636, and Samuel, baptised in October 1641. Hannah is the daughter who married Samuel Blakeslee in 1650 and Henry Brooks in 1676.
His own parents have no names. Jacobus opens the New Haven Potters with a man whose given name is a blank, married to a Hannah who died in 1659 and afterwards married a Beecher, and puts John and William under him as brothers. Whether he is the John Potter who married Elizabeth Wood at Chesham in Buckinghamshire in April 1630 is a question Jacobus raised in a bracket and did not answer.
Children
Sources
If John Potter is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "John Potter (d. 1643)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-potter-1643-0b7ef9.