Family Reunion: Hart
Going four generations back to find another line
This surname can be found among my Sixteen great-great-grandparents. We have to go that far back to find the first Hart in my tree. We start with:
Florence Mabel Hart - 02 Nov 1874 - 03 May 1945
Florence was the paternal grandmother of my maternal grandmother, Alberta (Tuttle) Clark. Florence was also the subject of “In Search of Lovey Hart” - one of the solid, lower rungs on my “Ladder to Providence” series. She was the daughter of Seymour C Hart (1851–1934) and Hattie Isette Wells (1854–1879), born on 2 Nov 1874 in Clinton, Worcester County, Massachusetts. Her mother died when Florence was 5 years old, and she went to live with her grandmother: Hattie's mother, Sarah (Fletcher) Wells, also in Clinton, Massachusetts.
Florence was an only child and didn’t seem to have grown up around other children. Her father remarried, but not until 1890; Florence married the following year, and the older of her two half-siblings, Charles, was born the year after that. Charles never had children, so we don’t expect to find any close cousins with the surname Hart; Florence’s half-sister, Harriet (Hart) Schaub, did have a daughter, two grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
Seymour Hart was the youngest of four children born to Alexander and Frances Hart in Lewis County, New York. We do have information about his paternal line for several generations, thanks to the Hart Name Study on WikiTree.
Alexander raised his family in Utica, New York, where he was a partner in a business that produced mill equipment - a business he learned from his father, Martin. I was able to determine that Martin was married to Sarah (or Sally) Collins, but I was unable to confirm whether Sally was the mother of Alexander or of his sister, Sarah.
Martin Hart was the son of Stephen Hart (1767–1857) and Eunice Seymour (1768–1848), born on 30 Oct 1792 in Torrington, Litchfield County, Connecticut. His family relocated to Turin, Lewis County, New York, in about 1800. Martin had six siblings who survived to adulthood, so there may yet be an unknown number of distant Hart cousins out there to find.
If you have a Hart in your tree, and you think you might be one of those cousins, say hello!
And if you’re interested in following along as I learn more: