Rev. John Sherman, born in Dedham, England, Dec. 26, 1613, educated at Cambridge, who came to America in 1634, also preached here for a short time. He was afterwards settled at Watertown Mass., had twenty-two children and died in 1685. The colony at New Haven, which was soon united with them, was founded in 1638, under Rev. John Davenport and Gov. Theophilus Eaton. They first met under an oak and afterward in a barn. After a day of fasting and prayer they established their first civil government on a simple plantation covenant “to obey the Scriptures.” Only church members had the franchise; the minister gave a public charge to the governor to judge righteously, with the text: “The cause that is too hard for you bring it unto me, and I will hear it,” “Thus,” says Bancroft, “New Haven made the Bible its statute book, and the elect its freemen.” The very atmosphere of New Haven is still full of the Divine favor distilled from the honor thus put upon God’s word in the foundation of its institutions. There were five capital qualities which greatly distinguished the early New England Puritans. I. Good intellectual endowments; they were of the party of Milton and Cromwell. II. Intense religiousness; the names Pilgrim and Puritan, are synonymous with zealous piety. III. Education; many were graduates of colleges; they founded Harvard in 1636. IV. Business thrift; godliness has the promise of the world that now is, as well as of that which is to come. V. Public spirit; they immediately built churches, schools, court houses, and state houses.
The newly married son to whom Julian Borman, the Puritan widow, with seven children, wrote from England in 1641, obviously partook of these common characteristics. He was soon recognized as a young man to be relied upon. “Few of the first settlers of Connecticut,” says Hinman, author of the genealogy of the Puritans, “came here with a better reputation, or sustained it more uniformly through life.”
In 1646-7-8. He was a juror.
1649. Appointed by the Gen. Court, sealer of weights and measures.
1657-8-9-60-61-62-63, and many years afterward, representative of Wethersfield in the Legislature of Connecticut, styled “Deputy to the General Court.”
Hinman says, few men, if any, in the colony, represented their own town for so many sessions.
1660. On the grand jury of the colony.
1670. Nominated assistant.
1662. Distributor of William’s estate.
1662. Appointed by Gen. Court on committee to pay certain taxes.
1665. Chairman of a committee appointed by the Legislature, to settle with the Indians the difficulty about the bounds of land near Middletown, “in an equitable way.”
1660. On a similar committee to purchase of the Indians Thirty Mile Island.
1665. Chairman of a committee of the Legislature to report on land, petitioned for by G. Higby.
1663. Appointed chairman of committee to lay out the bounds of Middletown.
He died just two hundred and twelve years ago in April, 1673. His estate was appraised by the selectmen of Wethersfield, May 2, 1673 at £742, 15s, about $4,000. His son Isaac then 31 years old is not named in the settlement of the estate, and had perhaps received his patrimony. He had ten children, seven sons and three daughters, of whom the youngest was six years old; he had three grandchildren, the children of his oldest son, Isaac. All his children received scriptural names, as was common in Puritan families. His descendants are now doubtless several thousands in number. Only a very small part, after two hundred and fifty years, of a man’s descendants bear his name. His daughters and their descendants, his sons’ daughters and their descendants, one-half, three-quarters, seven-eights, diverge from the ancestral name, etc., till but a thousandth part, after a few centuries retain the ancestral name, and those who retain it owe to a hundred others as much of their lineage as to him. Such is God’s plan; the race are endlessly interwoven together; no man liveth unto himself. But a few comparatively, of the descendants of Samuel Borman can now be traced. His own name, however, has been carried by them into the United States Senate; into the lower house of Congress; into many State Legislatures; to the bar and to the bench; into many pulpits, and into several chairs of collegiate and professional instruction. Yet these can represent but a few of his descendants who have been equally useful. Probably a larger number of them are still to be found in Connecticut than in any other state. Among them is the family of Rev. Noah Porter, D. D., LL. D., the President of Yale College, who married a daughter of Rev. Dr. N. W. Taylor. The prayers of Julian Borman for “her good sonne” – “her very loving sonne, Samuel Boreman” already reach, under the covenant promise of Him who remembers mercy to a thousand generations, a widely scattered family.
In the above letter the name is spelled both with and without the letter “e” after “r;” the letter “d” is not found until 1712. The letter “a,” was not inserted until 1750; so that the descendants of Samuel, may still bear all these names, Borman, Boreman, Bordman or Boardman, according to the generation at which the line traced, reaches the parent stock. It is said that the name, however spelled, is still pronounced “Borman,” at Wethersfield. The rise of Cromwell in England, the long Parliament, the Westminster Assembly, the execution of Charles the First, the establishment of the commonwealth, its power by sea and land, the death of the Protector, the restoration of Charles the Second, were events of which Samuel must have heard by letter from his brother and sisters, as well as in other ways. He doubtless had numerous kinsmen on the side of both his father and his mother, who were involved in these movements of the times in England. Perhaps Richard Boardman, one of the first two “Traveling Methodist Preachers on the continent,” who came here from England in 1769, was among the descendants.
At the same time the pioneer legislator in the Colonial General Court just established in the wilds of America, was aiding to lay Scriptural foundations for institutions of civil and religious liberty in the New World. He left a Thomas Boreman, perhaps an uncle, in Ipswich, Mass. During the thirty-seven years of his life, after his emigration, he saw new colonies planted at many points along the Atlantic coast. He saw the older colonies constantly strengthened by fresh arrivals, and by the natural increase of the population. Several other Boremans came to New England very early, some of whom may have been his kindred. He accumulated and left a considerable estate for that day, derived in part undoubtedly, from the increase in the value of the new lands, which he had at first occupied, and which he afterward sold at an advanced price. Some in every generation, of his descendants have done likewise; going first north, and east, and then further and further west. One of the descendants of his youngest son Nathaniel, now living, a man of distinguished ability, Hon. E. J. H. Boardman of Marshalltown, Iowa, is said to have amassed in this manner a large fortune.
Samuel Boreman died far from his early home and kindred. He was not buried beside father or mother, or by the graves of ancestors who had for centuries lived and died and been buried there; but on a continent separated from them by a great ocean. He was doubtless buried on the summit of the hill in the old cemetery at Wethersfield, in a spot which overlooks the broad and fertile meadows of the Connecticut river. In the same plot his children and grandchildren lie, with monuments, though no monument marks his own grave. In his childhood, he may have seen Shakespeare and Bacon. He lived cotemporary with Cromwell; and Milton, who died, a year after he was buried at Wethersfield. His wife Mary, the mother of us all, died eleven years later, in 1684, leaving an estate of $1,300. As his body was lowered into the grave, his widow and ten children may have stood around it, the oldest, Isaac, aged 31, with his two or three little children; the second, Mary, Mrs. Robbins, at the age of twenty-nine; Samuel, Jr., twenty-five; Joseph twenty-three; John twenty-one; Sarah, eighteen; Daniel, fifteen; Jonathan, thirteen; Nathaniel, ten; Martha, seven. Most of these children lived to have families, and left children, whose descendants now doubtless number thousands. Isaac had three sons and one daughter and died in 1719, at the age of seventy-seven. Samuel had two sons and three daughters, and died in 1720, at seventy-two years of age. Daniel, then fifteen; from whom Timothy Boardman, the author of the Log-Book, was descended; had twelve children, nine sons and three daughters, and died in 1724, at the age of seventy-six. Jonathan had two sons and three daughters, and died September 21, 1712, at the age of fifty-one. Nathaniel married in Windsor, at the age of forty-four, and had but one son, Nathaniel, and died two months after his next older brother Jonathan, perhaps of a contagious disease, November 29, 1712; at the age