Book Description

Excerpt from Memorial of the Lives and Services of James Pitts and His Sons, John, Samuel and Lendall, During the American Revolution, 1760-1780: With Genealogical and Historical Appendix This memorial will be written with no desire to trumpet the vir tues of that worthy man through the halls of ambition or fame, but only with a View of brushing from his memory the dust which an hun dred years have covered over it. His descendants are few and widely scattered. The great wealth possessed by that generation of the family was soon scattered, and gone, and most of those who drew their blood from his lineage, have been actively engaged in places far dis tant from the scene of his labors and influence, and to-day no one re mains to bear the name in old Boston, the city where Pitts street and Pitts wharf, and the Pitts tomb, in King's Chapel burying-ground, sometimes recall the name of a forgotten hero to the passer-by. So itis with the Lindall and Bowdoin families, with whom he was so closely allied, his mother being a Lindall and his wife a Bowdoin. No Lin dall or Bowdoin descendant in the male line is known to exist any where, and the few male members of the Pitts family all reside far from the old Bay State, whose political and financial foundations they helped to lay. James Bowdoin was the President of the convention which framed the constitution of that State, and his nephew, John Pitts, was the Speaker of the first House of Representatives of Massachusetts, in 1778, and to-day there is no living descendant to either of them, in the male line, to bear their names. Of the early life of J ames Pitts I have been able as yet to learn but little. His father, John Pitts, was a son of Berwick Pitts, of Lyme Regis, County Dorset, England, a small seaport on the southern coast. Here John was born about 1668, and came to Boston about 1695 and was a merchant of prominence and success. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.