John leavitt biography

On this cold Sunday winter evening of January 4 in the year of our lord 1691, I take my pen in hand to write a short history of my life to my future descendants so they will know how I got to this place and what I did during my life.

I am in my 83rd year of life on this earth and I am not sure how many more years the good lord will give me. It is a cold winter evening as usual for this time of year and I have just returned from our church service in the grand Ship Church, that we built about ten years ago.

I was born in 1608 in Beverly, Yorkshire, England, the first son of Percival and Mary Linkley Leavitt.  My parents had 9 children, 4 sons and 5 daughters.  I don’t remember too much of my early childhood, but remember being hungry and at times not having much food on the table.  At the age of 13, I became an apprentice and planned to become a maker of clothing. 

In these times in order to survive one must have a trade in order to make a living.  I never truly enjoyed being a tailor and frankly was not that good at it.  I found myself dreaming of a more exciting life where I could grow my own food and have land of my own and a family.  The likelihood of this becoming true however seemed awful doubtful at the time. 

I had heard stories of groups of English people heading for the new world of New England and how they planned to build communities, have their own land, church and families.  This was very exciting to me and something I longed for and dreamed about, but since I was indentured to serve my master until my 21st birthday the prospects seemed out of the question.

One evening when I was 16 years old, our family had a visit from my Uncle Christopher Levett, who was a Captain in the English Navy and the Kings Woodward of Somersetshire, which means he was an expert on wood for building English ships.  He is my favorite uncle. He had just returned from New England and had explore

For other people named John Leavitt, see John Leavitt (disambiguation).

Deacon John Leavitt (1608–1691) was a tailor, public officeholder, and founding deacon of Old Ship Church in Hingham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, the only remaining 17th-century Puritanmeeting house in America and the oldest church in continuous ecclesiastical use in the United States. Hingham's Leavitt Street is named for the early settler, whose descendants have lived in Hingham for centuries.

Biography

Leavitt was born in 1608 in England, in Beverly, Yorkshire. Leavitt first appears in the annals of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, when he is shown in records of Dorchester, Massachusetts, as having been granted a house lot. Within two years, the early settler had moved to nearby Hingham, where he was granted land in 1636. In his early history of Hingham, attorney Solomon Lincoln recited the oft-told tale of Leavitt's supposed origins:

"The family tradition concerning John Leavitt is that he was an indentedapprentice in England," wrote Lincoln in 1827, "and that he absconded from his master and came to this country when nineteen years of age.... He received a grant of land in this town in 1636. His homestead was in Leavitt-street, recently so named, on both sides of the river."

In the same year, Leavitt took the Freeman's Oath of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In records on file at Boston Leavitt is shown on March 3, 1636, as pledging loyalty to the English Crown. In the early Massachusetts record the early English settler is listed as John Levett, as the tailor apparently spelled his own name for several decades, until it became corrupted later in life.

After moving to Hingham, Leavitt's first wife Mary died, and he subsequently remarried at Hingham on December 16, 1646, Sarah Gilman, daughter of Edward Gilman Sr., a fellow

American lawyer

John Brooks Leavitt (1849–1930) was a New York City attorney, author and reformer. As member of the "Good Government" movement, Leavitt crusaded against Tammany Hall municipal corruption, demanding in 1897 the indictment of United States SenatorThomas C. Platt on charges of extorting bribes from the New York Life Insurance Company in return for favors to the insurance giant. "We have positive evidence, which as soon as New York has an honest District Attorney," Leavitt told a crowd of 2,000 gathered at Long Acre Square on Broadway, "will be laid before him, and we then shall be able to obtain an indictment and send the arch-boss to the jail which yawns for him."

Early life and career beginnings

John Brooks Leavitt was born September 30, 1849, at Cincinnati, Ohio, where his father John McDowell Leavitt was practicing law, and his wife Bethia (Brooks) Leavitt. Leavitt subsequently attended high school in Zanesville, Ohio, where his father acted as minister of an Episcopal church after leaving his law practice. In 1868 Leavitt graduated from Kenyon College, and four years later he graduated with a master's degree. Leavitt then enrolled at the Columbia University School of Law, where he graduated in 1871.

Following his graduation from Columbia, Leavitt began clerking in a New York City law office, and shortly after hung out his shingle as sole practitioner. Leavitt's practice was meager, but gradually he found clients, usually cases he took when he felt a client had been shortchanged. An early client was a clergyman who was accused of grave immorality. In a subsequent case tied to election fraud, Leavitt filed suit against the New York State Secretary of State, the state's Attorney General and other state officers for contempt of court. The state officers sued by Leavitt were heavily fined by the court for their offense.

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