Place:Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut, United States

Research Tips

Hartford - a Dutch trading post in 1633. Settled 1635 and called Newtown. Named Hartford in 1637. - Ricker, 8.

Hartford Vital Records Transcript at the Connecticut State Library and NEHGS

"This volume contains a list alphabetically arranged of all the vital records of the town of Hartford from its incorporation to about 1855. The entire record of the town prior to about 1700 is found scattered through the Book of Distributions and early Land Records. Only scattering items between 1700 and 1786 are extant. That known as Volume 1 of Vital Records begins about 1786 but contains mostly marriages only.

This list was taken from a set of cards based on the Vital Records found in the 'Original Distribution of the Lands in Hartford among the Settlers, 1639', printed in 1912 by the Connecticut Historical Society, a book published in 1898 by E. Stanley Welles entitled 'Births Marriages and Deaths … entered in Volumes 1 and 2 of Land Records and No. D. of Colonial Deeds', a copy of the Vital Records found in the Land Records and made by Mr. Prank Farnsworth Starr, of Middletown, Conn., and a photostat copy of Volume 1 of Vital Records, all of which are now in the Connecticut State Library. Reference to entries in the Book of Distributions is indicated by the abbreviation 'D' and the original pagination; reference to Mr. Welles' book is indicated by the abbreviation 'Col.' and the folio number; reference to Mr. Starr's copy is indicated by the abbreviation 'FFS' and the pagination of Mr. Starr's manuscript. Pages 1 to 39 of this manuscript duplicate entries from the Book of Distributions; pages 39 to 56 are entries found in Vol. 1 of Land Records; pages 56 to 75, entries in Vol. 2, of Land Records; pages 75 to 83, entries in Vol. 3 of Land Records; pages 83 to 84, entries in Vol. 5, of Land Records; page 84 has one entry found on page 467 of Vol. 11 of Land Records; pages 84 to 87, entries in Vol. 12 of Land Records; page 88 has entries found on page 430 of Vol. 14 of Land Records; pages 86 to 94, entries in Vol. 30 of Land Records; and pages 94 to 98, entries in Vol. 31 of Land Records.

The cards have not been compared with the original records and doubtless errors exist. It is hoped that as errors or omissions are found notes will be entered in this book and on the cards which are included in the General Index of Connecticut Vital Records also in the possession of the Connecticut State Library. …

Hartford, Conn., January, 1929"

The City

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the 2010 United States census have indicated that Hartford is the fourth-largest city in Connecticut with a 2020 population of 121,054, behind the coastal cities of Bridgeport, New Haven, and Stamford.

Hartford was founded in 1635 and is among the oldest cities in the United States. It is home to the country's oldest public art museum (Wadsworth Atheneum), the oldest publicly funded park (Bushnell Park), the oldest continuously published newspaper (the Hartford Courant), and the second-oldest secondary school (Hartford Public High School). It is also home to the Mark Twain House, where the author wrote his most famous works and raised his family, among other historically significant sites. Mark Twain wrote in 1868, "Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief."

Hartford was the richest city in the United States for several decades following the American Civil War. Today, it is one of the poorest cities in the U.S., with 3 out of every 10 families living below the poverty threshold. In sharp contrast, the Greater Hartford metropolitan statistical area was ranked 32nd of 318 metropolitan areas in total economic production and 8th out of 280 metropolitan statistical areas in per capita income in 2015.

Nicknamed the "Insurance Capital of the World", Hartford holds high sufficiency as a global city, as home to the headquarters of many insurance companies, the region's major industry. Other prominent industries include the services, education and healthcare industries. Hartford coordinates certain Hartford-Springfield regional development matters through the Knowledge Corridor Economic Partnership.^[1]

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Various tribes lived in or around Hartford, all Algonquian peoples. These included the Podunks, mostly east of the Connecticut River; the Poquonocks north and west of Hartford; the Massacoes in the Simsbury area; the Tunxis tribe in West Hartford and Farmington; the Wangunks to the south; and the Saukiog in Hartford itself.

Colonial Hartford

The first Europeans known to have explored the area were the Dutch under Adriaen Block, who sailed up the Connecticut in 1614. Dutch fur traders from New Amsterdam returned in 1623 with a mission to establish a trading post and fortify the area for the Dutch West India Company. The original site was located on the south bank of the Park River in the present-day Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhood. This fort was called Fort Hoop or the "House of Hope." In 1633, Jacob Van Curler formally bought the land around Fort Hoop from the Pequot chief for a small sum. It was home to perhaps a couple families and a few dozen soldiers. The fort was abandoned by 1654, but the area is known today as Dutch Point; the name of the Dutch fort "House of Hope" is reflected in the name of Huyshope Avenue. A significant reason for establishment of the Dutch trading post was to better control the flow of wampum, the de facto currency of New Netherlands and portions of New England, to and from valuable Native American fur traders.

The Dutch outpost and the tiny contingent of Dutch soldiers who were stationed there did little to check the English migration, and the Dutch soon realized that they were vastly outnumbered. The House of Hope remained an outpost, but it was steadily swallowed up by waves of English settlers. In 1650, Peter Stuyvesant met with English representatives to negotiate a permanent boundary between the Dutch and English colonies; the line that they agreed on was more than west of the original settlement.

The English began to arrive in 1636, settling upstream from Fort Hoop near the present-day Downtown and Sheldon/Charter Oak neighborhoods. Puritan pastors Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, along with Governor John Haynes, led 100 settlers with 130 head of cattle in a trek from Newtown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (now Cambridge) and started their settlement just north of the Dutch fort. The settlement was originally called Newtown, but it was changed to Hartford in 1637 in honor of Stone's hometown of Hertford, England. Hooker also created the nearby town of Windsor in 1633. The etymology of Hartford is the ford where harts cross, or "deer crossing."

As the Puritan minister in Hartford, Thomas Hooker wielded a great deal of power; in 1638, he delivered a sermon that inspired the writing of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which provided a framework for Connecticut's separation for Massachusetts Bay Colony and the formation of a civil government. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut were the legal basis for Connecticut Colony until the 1662 royal charter granted to Connecticut by Charles II.

The original settlement area contained the site of the Charter Oak, an old white oak tree in which colonists hid Connecticut's Royal Charter of 1662 to protect it from confiscation by an English governor-general. The state adopted the oak tree as the emblem on the Connecticut state quarter. The Charter Oak Monument is located at the corner of Charter Oak Place, a historic street, and Charter Oak Avenue.

19th century

Political turmoil

On December 15, 1814, delegates from the five New England states (Maine was still part of Massachusetts at that time) gathered at the Hartford Convention to discuss New England's possible secession from the United States. During the early 19th century, the Hartford area was a center of abolitionist activity, and the most famous abolitionist family was the Beechers. The Reverend Lyman Beecher was an important Congregational minister known for his anti-slavery sermons. His daughter Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; her brother Henry Ward Beecher was a noted clergyman who vehemently opposed slavery and supported the temperance movement and women's suffrage. The Stowes' sister Isabella Beecher Hooker was a leading member of the women's rights movement.

In 1860, Hartford was the site of the first "Wide Awakes", abolitionist supporters of Abraham Lincoln. These supporters organized torch-light parades that were both political and social events, often including fireworks and music, in celebration of Lincoln's visit to the city. This type of event caught on and eventually became a staple of mid-to-late 19th-century campaigning.

Hartford was a major manufacturing city from the 19th century until the mid-20th century. During the Industrial Revolution into the mid-20th century, the Connecticut River Valley cities produced many major precision manufacturing innovations. Among these was Hartford's pioneer bicycle and automobile maker Pope. Many factories have been closed or relocated, or have reduced operations, as in nearly all former Northern manufacturing cities.

Rise of a major manufacturing center

Around 1850, Hartford native Samuel Colt perfected the precision manufacturing process that enabled the mass production of thousands of his revolvers with interchangeable parts. A variety of industries adopted and adapted these techniques over the next several decades, and Hartford became the center of production for a wide array of products, including: Colt, Richard Gatling, and John Browning firearms; Weed sewing machines; Columbia bicycles; Pope automobiles; and leading typewriter manufacturers Royal Typewriter Company and Underwood Typewriter Company which together made Hartford the “Typewriter Capitol of the World” during the first half of the 20th century.

The Pratt & Whitney Company was founded in Hartford in 1860 by Francis A. Pratt and Amos Whitney. They built a substantial factory in which the company manufactured a wide range of machine tools, including tools for the makers of sewing machines, and gun-making machinery for use by the Union Army during the American Civil War. In 1925, the company expanded into aircraft engine design at its Hartford factory.

Just three years after Colt's first factory opened, the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company set up shop in 1852 at a nearby site along the now-buried Park River, located in the present-day neighborhood of Frog Hollow. Their factory heralded the beginning of the area's transformation from marshy farmland into a major industrial zone. The road leading from town to the factory was called Rifle Lane; the name was later changed to College Street and then Capitol Avenue. A century earlier, mills had located along the Park River because of the water power, but by the 1850s water power was approaching obsolescence. Sharps located there specifically to take advantage of the railroad line that had been constructed alongside the river in 1838.

The Sharps Rifle Company failed in 1870, and the Weed Sewing Machine Company took over its factory. The invention of a new type of sewing machine led to a new application of mass production after the principles of interchangeability were applied to clocks and guns. The Weed Company played a major role in making Hartford one of three machine tool centers in New England and even outranked the Colt Armory in nearby Coltsville in size.^[2] Weed eventually became the birthplace of both the bicycle and automobile industries in Hartford.

Industrialist Albert Pope was inspired by a British-made, high-wheeled bicycle (called a velocipede) that he saw at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and he bought patent rights for bicycle production in the United States. He wanted to contract out his first order, however, so he approached George Fairfield of Weed Sewing Machine Company, who produced Pope's first run of bicycles in 1878. Bicycles proved to be a huge commercial success, and production expanded in the Weed factory, with Weed making every part but the tires. Demand for bicycles overshadowed the failing sewing machine market by 1890, so Pope bought the Weed factory, took over as its president, and renamed it the Pope Manufacturing Company. The bicycle boom was short-lived, peaking near the turn of the century when more and more consumers craved individual automobile travel, and Pope's company suffered financially from over-production amidst falling demand.

In an effort to save his business, Pope opened a motor carriage department and turned out electric carriages, beginning with the "Mark III" in 1897. His venture might have made Hartford the capital of the automobile industry were it not for the ascendancy of Henry Ford and a series of pitfalls and patent struggles that outlived Pope himself.

In 1876, Hartford Machine Screw was granted a charter "for the purpose of manufacturing screws, hardware and machinery of every variety." The basis for its incorporation was the invention of the first single-spindle automatic screw machine. For its next four years, the new firm occupied one of Weed's buildings, milling thousands of screws daily on over 50 machines. Its president was George Fairfield, who ran Weed, and its superintendent was Christopher Spencer, one of Connecticut's most versatile inventors. Soon Hartford Machine Screw outgrew its quarters and built a new factory adjacent to Weed, where it remained until 1948.

20th century

On the week of April 12, 1909, the Connecticut River reached a record flood stage of 24.5 feet (7.47 meters) above the low-water mark, flooding the city of Hartford and doing great damage. On July 6, 1944, Hartford was the scene of one of the worst fire disasters in the history of the United States. Claiming the lives of 168 persons, mostly children and their mothers, and injuring several hundred more. It occurred at a matinee performance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus on Barbour Street in the city's north end and became known as the Hartford Circus Fire.

After World War II, many residents of Puerto Rico moved to Hartford. Starting in the late 1950s, the suburbs ringing Hartford began to grow and flourish and the capital city began a long decline. Insurance giant Connecticut General (now CIGNA) moved to a new, modern campus in the suburb of Bloomfield. Constitution Plaza had been hailed as a model of urban renewal, but it gradually became a concrete office park. Once-flourishing department stores shut down, such as Brown Thomson, Sage-Allen, and G. Fox & Co., as suburban malls grew in popularity, such as Westfarms and Buckland Hills.

In 1997, the city lost its professional hockey franchise, with the Hartford Whalers moving to Raleigh, North Carolina—despite an increase in season ticket sales and an offer from the state for a new arena. In 2005, a developer from Newton, Massachusetts tried unsuccessfully to bring an NHL team back to Hartford and house them in a new, publicly funded stadium.

Hartford experienced problems as the population shrank 11 percent during the 1990s. Only Flint, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, St. Louis, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland experienced larger population losses during the decade. However, the population has increased since the 2000 Census.

In 1987, Carrie Saxon Perry was elected mayor of Hartford, becoming the first female African-American mayor of a major American city. Riverfront Plaza was opened in 1999, connecting the riverfront and the downtown area for the first time since the 1960s.

21st century

A significant number of cultural events and performances take place every year at Mortensen Plaza (Riverfront Recapture Organization) by the banks of the Connecticut River. These events are held outdoors and include live music, festivals, dance, arts and crafts.^[3] Hartford also has a vibrant theater scene with major Broadway productions at the Bushnell Theater as well as performances at the Hartford Stage and TheaterWorks (City Arts).

In July 2017, Hartford considered filing Chapter 9 bankruptcy. After years of shrinking population base and high pension obligations, a $65 Million Dollar budget gap was projected for the year of 2018. The city had cut budget of public services and gotten union concessions however these measures did not balance the budget.^[4] A state bailout later that year kept the city from filing for bankruptcy.

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog