Other Events:

• Group: Hall Direct Descendant
• Group: Halls of Wallingford - DNA Family 032
• FindaGrave Memorial ID: 11173268

Notes:

From FindaGrave:

Pastor of ye Church in Cheshire, he was in the 81st year of his age and the 52d of his ministry.

Inscription at the bottom of his tombstone:
A friend of God, a guide of Christ
Does here repose their peaceful dust,
To rest in darkness in ye tomb
Till Gabriel's trumet wake the just.

The son of John & Mary (Lyman) Hall, he graduated Yale College in 1716 and was the pastor of the Congregational Church in Cheshire from 1723 through 1775. On January 12, 1725, Rev. Samuel Hall and Ann Law, daughter of Lt. Gov. Jonathan Law and his wife, Ann (Elliott) Law, were married by her father.
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Rev. Samuel Hall married, January 12, 1725, Ann Law, eldest daughter of Governor Jonathan Law (Harvard, 1695) and Ann (Eliot) Law. Ann Eliot was the daughter of Rev. Joseph Eliot of Guilford, and granddaughter of Rev. John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians, and also of Governor William Brenton of Rhode Island.

Their children were as follows:

The first is Clark, born ye 23rd of July, 1727, A month later, August 23d, is recorded the announcement of the death of their first-born.

The second birth is Jonathan (gift of God), born July 11, 1728; died July 12, 1728.

The third is Benoni (son of trouble), born November 4, 1729; died November 19, 1729.

The following year, September 11, 1730, was born the fourth child, Luce, that is "light," and such she proved to a desolate household. She lived to maturity and married Charles, a son of Wallingford's minister, the Rev. Samuel Whittelsey.

Their fifth child, called Samuel, came to them January 11, 1732, but died in May following from the dread scourge of smallpox.

On May 10, 1733, was born their sixth child, to whom was given the mother's name Ann. She lived to grow up and was married to Rev. Warham Williams (Yale 1745), Fellow and Secretary of Yale College, who preached at North Branford.

On May 31, 1734 a son was born to him, and the father's name was given for the third time (Samuel, "asked for of God"). Great pains were taken with this boy's education. He was carefully prepared for Yale, where he graduated in 1754, his name like his father's standing at the head of his class. But over-application undermined his health, and the year after graduation, at the age of 21, the pride and hope of his parents was cut down by death.

Mary, the eighth child, lived to justify her parents' hopes. She married Deacon Samuel Beach of Cheshire, by whom she had three children, Mary Ann, Luce, and Samuel Ufford Beach. The grandfather's will leaves to these children articles of silver plate and jewelry, besides "a great interest in lands." In the attainments of his son-in-law Mr. Hall took great pride. Mr. Beach was of Yale 1757, became an attorney of great prominence, was a delegate to the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, and filled many other offices of public trust.
April 2, 1738, was born the ninth child, who was named "Brenton" after the mother's lineal ancestor, Governor William Brenton of Rhode Island, from whom considerable property descended to the family. This son lived to the advanced age of eighty-two years, became the executor of his father's estate, a founder of Meriden and its first representative.

The tenth child of Rev. Samuel and Ann (Law) Hall was Elisha, born March 10, 1740, and graduated at Yale 1764. He married Lois, widow of Jesse Street and daughter of Col. Thaddeus Cook.

The eleventh child, Sarah, born August 8, 1742, married Mr. Hills, who with his wife died previous to 1776, leaving an only child "Catee Hills," to whom the grandfather left by will all his household effects.

The twelfth child, Jonathan, born July 19, 1745, married and settled on the old homestead at Cheshire.

The thirteenth child, born December 17, 1748, "the child of his old age, last and best beloved," was called Abigail (the father's joy). Intimate in the family and for some years under the pastor's instruction, had been a bright and ambitious young man named John Foote, born in 1742, son of John and Abigail (Frisbie) Foote of North Branford. Mr. Foote prepared for Yale, where he graduated in 1765, and later studied theology under Rev. Samuel Hall. The acquaintance thus formed between John Foote and Abigail Hall soon ripened into love, and they were married November 19, 1767. The children by this marriage were unusually talented. The eldest daughter, Lucinda, passed the examination for Yale when twelve years old. John was admitted as freshman at nine years of age. Samuel A. graduated at Yale, received the degree of Doctor of Laws, was twice elected to Congress, and then made Governor of Connecticut.

~The above excerpt was taken from "Hall Ancestry", by Charles Samuel Hall; G. P. Putnam's sons, 1896; pg. 261-266.

Group:
A person who is a direct descendant of any colonial New England Hall Family

Group:
Descendants of John Hall and Jane Woolen of New Haven and Wallingford.

FindaGrave Memorial ID:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/11173268

Samuel married Anna Law on 25 Jan 1725/26 in Wallingford, New Haven County, Connecticut. Anna (daughter of Gov. Jonathan Law and Anna Eliot) was born on 1 Aug 1702 in Milford, New Haven County, Connecticut; died on 23 Aug 1775 in Cheshire, New Haven County, Connecticut; was buried after 23 Aug 1775 in Hillside Cemetery, Cheshire, New Haven County, Connecticut. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events:

• Group: Hall Direct Descendant
• Group: Halls of Wallingford - DNA Family 032
• FamilySearch ID: M2T8-72G

Notes:

Group:
A person who is a direct descendant of any colonial New England Hall Family

Group:
Descendants of John Hall and Jane Woolen of New Haven and Wallingford.

FamilySearch ID:
https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/M2T8-72G

Mary married Deacon Samuel Beach on 30 Aug 1759 in Wallingford, New Haven County, Connecticut. Samuel (son of Capt. Elnathan Beach and Abigail Ufford) was born on 26 Dec 1737 in Wallingford, New Haven County, Connecticut; was christened on 8 Jan 1737/38 in Cheshire, New Haven County, Connecticut; died on 11 Jul 1805 in Cheshire, New Haven County, Connecticut. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events:

• Group: Hall Direct Descendant
• Group: Halls of Wallingford - DNA Family 032
• FindaGrave Memorial ID: 6154067

Notes:

From FindaGrave:

Rev. War


Inscription

    AE. 82 y's (husband of Abigail)


Gravesite Details

from "A Century of Meriden" 1906

Group:
A person who is a direct descendant of any colonial New England Hall Family

Group:
Descendants of John Hall and Jane Woolen of New Haven and Wallingford.

FindaGrave Memorial ID:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6154067

Brenton married Lament Collins before 1764. Lament died before 1784. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Brenton married Abigail Baldwin in 1784. Abigail was born on 12 Dec 1749 in Branford, New Haven County, Connecticut; died on 5 May 1837 in Meriden, New Haven County, Connecticut; was buried after 5 May 1837 in Broad Street Cemetery, Meriden, New Haven County, Connecticut. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Other Events:

• Group: Hall Direct Descendant
• Group: Halls of Wallingford - DNA Family 032
• FindaGrave Memorial ID: 22801399

Notes:

From FindaGrave:

Age 65 years.

William Brenton Hall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

William Brenton Hall (b. May 31, 1764 - d. June 29, 1809) was an eighteenth-century physician in Connecticut, United States.

Born in Wallingford, Connecticut, William Brenton Hall was the eldest son of Brenton Hall, a prosperous farmer, and Lament Collins, daughter of Captain Jonathan and Agnes (Linn) Collins of Wallingford. Brenton Hall was son of Rev. Samuel Hall of Cheshire (Yale, 1716). Described by Ezra Stiles as the wealthiest minister in Connecticut, the Rev. Hall owned extensive properties in central Connecticut, as well as land inherited from his mother's prominent Rhode Island family, the Brentons.

Hall was extraordinarily well-connected. His uncle, Jonathan Law (Harvard 1695), served as Governor (1741-1750) and Chief Justice of Connecticut (1724-1741). His great-grandfather, served on the Governor's Council. His cousin, Lyman Hall, would serve as Governor of Georgia and would be signer of the Declaration of Independence. His uncle Elihu Hall (Yale 1731) was King's Attorney for the Colony. The land-rich Halls and their kin were pillars of the Old Light faction of Congregationalists that opposed the Great Awakening and the asecendant commercial interests associated with it.

William Brenton Hall attended local schools and was prepared for Yale by the Rev. Enoch Huntington of Middletown. He entered the college in 1782. On graduating in 1786, he went to Philadelphia to attend medical lectures at Pennsylvania Hospital, then completed his training with Dr. Jared Potter of Wallingford (Yale 1760). He set up practice in Middletown, then the largest city in the state and one of its most prosperous seaports.

In 1796, Dr. Hall married Mehetable Parsons, daughter of Revolutionary hero, Major General Samuel Holden Parsons (Harvard 1756), who had died while serving as Chief Justice of the Northwest Territory. The marriage brought him substantial land holdings in Ohio, as well as a host of distinguished relatives, including brothers-in-law, Stephen Titus Hosmer, who would become Chief Justice of the State of Connecticut, Enoch Parsons, who would head the Middletown branch of the Bank of the United States, and Samuel Holden Parsons, who would long serve as High Sheriff of Middlesex County.

Better prepared than most of his apprenticeship-trained contemporaries, Hall quickly became one of the leading physicians in the state. He pioneered obstetrics, guided by the detailed illustrated manuals, published in Edinburgh, that he brought back from his studies in Philadelphia. He was particularly concerned with epidemic disease, repeatedly petitioning town authorities in Wallingford and Middletown for permission to establish a "pock house" for inoculating against small pox.

Hall's anti-federalist political inclinations may have helped him to develop a relationship with Boston physician Benjamin Waterhouse, a correspondent of British physician Edward Jenner, discoverer of vaccination. Jenner sent samples of cowpox matter to Waterhouse, some of which may have been passed on to Hall, who appears to have been the first physician in Connecticut to practice vaccination.

In 1796, Hall played a heroic role during a yellow fever epidemic at Knowles Landing, south of Middletown on the Connecticut River. When all the village's established physicians had fled, Hall stayed on to care for the sick and bury the dead. His exploits were reported in Miner & Tully's Essays on Fevers (1823), a pioneering study of epidemic disease.

Hall played a leading role in organizing the Connecticut Medical Society and served as its treasurer from 1799 until his death a decade later. He was noted as an educator of physicians and often had as many as six apprentices residing with him in his spacious house on Middletown's Main Street.[citation needed]

As Federalists struggled to take control of the Medical Society in 1807, Hall and his Jeffersonian friends, who were officers of the society, became the object of a vicious satirical poem by physician and wit, Mason Fitch Cogswell:

Next see arise and puff across the stage,/ The learned puppet of this learned age./ This pious child in Middletown appears,/ With tongue much more supplied, than brains, or ears. . . ./ With him, to make young Doctors rules are vain,/ "Blair's Lectures" only, make the business plain,/ With these in hand, he turns them out as fast/ As tramping tinkers pewter buttons cast./ Strange, very strange, thatin one soul we find/ Such great and numerous offices combined;/ Surgeon, Demagogue, Preceptor, Preacher,/ Dentist, Physician, Midwife, Rhetoric-teacher,/ Moral Philosopher, Schoolmaster, all/ Unite & harmonize in Doctor Hall.


Death

According to his contemporaries, alcoholism was an occupational disease for physicians in this era. Hall, known to be a heavy drinker, began to fail in the spring of 1809. Attempting to visit a patient in June 1809, he fell from his horse and died of his injuries on June 29, aged 45. He left a widow and two young sons, William Brenton and Samuel Holden Parsons. He is buried in the Liberty Street Cemetery in Middletown.


Posthumous

Despite the advantages of pedigree and education, Hall was handicapped by the time and place in which he lived. The extensive kinship network of which he was a part would have served him well had the Old Lights been able to maintain their political dominance. Defeats at the polls and in ecclesiatical tribunals pushed them to the margins. Many, like Hall and his father Brenton (who represented Meriden in the legislature for many terms), became anti-federalists and ardent Jeffersonians. Others, like Hall's siblings, abandoned the established Congregational church for dissenting sects. This constituted a major obstacle to success in a state dominated by an oppressive Federalist-Congregationalist political machine.

Had Hall followed his Yale classmate, fellow physician Elihu Hubbard Smith, to New York -- where political and religious heterodoxy was tolerated --, he might have had a more distinguished career. Smith, who also studied medicine at Pennsylvania Hospital, established himself in New York, where he founded America's first medical journal, the Medical Repository.


References

Mason Fitch Cogswell. n.d. (c. 1806). "From the Characteristics -- An Unpublished Poem." Cogswell Papers. Connecticut Historical Society.
Franklin B. Dexter (ed.). The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles. New York, NY: Charles Scribners' Sons.
Franklin B. Dexter. 1907. Yale Biographies and Annals, 1778-1792. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company.
Franklin B. Dexter (ed.). 1916. Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, D.D., LL.D., 1755-1794. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Charles Samuel Hall. 1894. Hall Ancestry. New York, NY: G.P. Putnam.
Rufus Matthewson. 1877. "Biographical Sketches of the Early Members of the Middlesex County Medical Society." Connecticut State Medical Society Proceedings.
Thomas Miner & William Tully. 1823. Essays on Fevers and Other Medical Subjects. Middletown, CT: E.H. Clark.
Edmund S. Morgan. 1962. The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Herbert Thoms (ed.). 1942. Heritage of Connecticut Medicine. New Haven, CT: privately printed.

Group:
A person who is a direct descendant of any colonial New England Hall Family

Group:
Descendants of John Hall and Jane Woolen of New Haven and Wallingford.

FindaGrave Memorial ID:
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/22801399

William married Mehitable Parsons in 1796. Mehitable was born on 24 Dec 1772 in Lyme, New London County, Connecticut; died on 1 Nov 1828 in Middletown, Middlesex County, Connecticut; was buried after 1 Nov 1828 in Mortimer Cemetery, Middletown, Middlesex County, Connecticut. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]