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Brief Biographical Sketch:

Samuel Stocking (1650) / Bethia (Hopkins) Stocking

Name: Samuel Stocking

Birth: About 1620, England; specific date & location unknown.

Emigration: From England in 1633 with his father on the ship Griffin to Cambridge, Mass.; to Hartford with Thomas Hooker party, 1636; to Middletown 1653.(FFS; Stocking Ancestry/Stocking, 1903)

Death: December 31, 1683, Middletown, Conn.(MVR)

Occupation & Public Service: Appointed to a committee for laying out lands, November 1653. "He held the offices of Townsman, rate maker, surveyor of highways, grand levy man, and fence viewer. He was a Deputy to the General Court for several sessions."(FFS)

Marriage: m.(1) Bethia Hopkins, May 27, 1652, Hartford, Conn. (Hartford Vital Records) (b. unknown date, perhaps in Hartford, Conn.; d. 1692, Hartford, Conn.). She was the daughter of John Hopkins and Jane (Strong) Hopkins of Braintree, Essex, England, and later Hartford, Conn. Stocking Ancestry/Stocking, 1903)

Children: 9 children between 1654-1677.(MVR, BCVR) (See in-depth profile in Member Area for details.)

Compiler's Note: According to an article in The American Genealogist by Robert Charles Anderson, FASG, the long held belief that Bethia Hopkins married Samuel Stocking at age 11 was due to a misdated deposition in a probate proceeding. (TAG, Vol. 77, No. 1, January 2002).

See abbreviation code for sources. And then verify, verify, verify, verify.
For more biographical information see the In-Depth Profile in the Member Area.

The First Meeting House, Middletown, Conn. The engraving below by W.C. Butler was a fanciful illustration for David Field's Centennial Address published in 1853. In 1939 the image was used on the title page of The Log Cabin Myth by Harold R. Shurtleff. Surrounding the engraving are signatures of some of the first settlers as found on wills and deeds by Charles C. Adams in preparation of Middletown Upper Houses (1908).