Samuel ROBERTS

                   1. Catherine "Leeke" has appeared as "Leete" in some records. Best evidence indicates that Leeke is correct.

2. We all know the story of the arrival of the Pilgrims in 1620 and of the subsequent establishment of the Plymouth Colony with its several towns. We also know the story of the Puritans who began coming to New England in 1629. They settled near the Plymouth Colony, and founded Boston and nearby towns and became the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Puritans hated sin and thought it their duty to punish people who they believed to be sinners. Their political government was church-connected and church-led. This caused much discontent and in 1635 and 1636, several hundred residents of the Bay Colony moved into the Connecticut River Valley in the Windsor-Hardford-Wethersfield area. Here in 1639 they adopted the Hartford Constitution called the Fundamental Orders, which is honored as the first written constitution of a self-governing people. It was based on the concept that "The foundation of authority is in the free consent of the people."

Included among those who helped found this first permanent settlement in Connecticut were our ancestral families of Dibble, Gibbs, Phelps, Wetmore (Whitmore) and Wilton. Among those who came to the settlements later were Adkins, Griswold, Hoskins, Marshall, and Moore.

On 10 April 1638, a group of Puritans under the leadership of Theophilus Eaton and the Reverend John Davenport founded New Haven which did not become a part of Connecticut until 1665. They had arrived in Boston the summer before from England but found the Bay Colony not sufficiently church centered to suite their ideas (in contrast to the founders of the Connecticut settlements who found it too much so). Included in this group were our ancestral families of Brockett, Clark, Hill, and Tuttle. Others who soon joined the New Haven Colony were Bradley, Lane, and Wakefield.

Middletown, Connecticut, also in the Connecticut River Valley, was settled in 1650 by families from the Hartford area. Included in this group were our ancestral families of Hall, Marshall, and Wetmore (Whitmore). And to Middletown, probably not long before her marriage to Thomas Wetmore on 18 October 1637, came the widow Catherine Roberts, and her three Roberts sons, William, our Samuel, and John. Her first husband's given name is not certain, nor is their marriage date known at present.

About fifty years later came the settlement of Litchfield County in northwest Connecticut and here our Puritan ancestral lines came together with the marriage of Ephraim Roberts and Huldah Gibbs on 15 May 1796.

In the meantime, we lost one ancestor in King Phillip's War. Captain Samuel Marshall died on 19 December 1675, the opening day of the attack on the Narragansett Indian fort in Rhode Island. Another early Colonial Militia officer was Lt. David Wilton, and perhaps there were others.

We lost two ancestors during the Revolutionary War. Gershom Gibbs, Sr. was captured during the fall of Fort Washington on Manhattan Island on 16 November 1776. He died 29 December 1776 aboard a British prison ship in New York Harbor. Ephraim Roberts, Sr. served in the Connecticut Militia and contracted illness which led to his death on 5 July 1776. Gershom Gibbs, Jr. served with the Connecticut Troops and later drew a pension for his services.

In contrast to our war heros, we have one ancestral Puritan minister, the Reverend Nicholas Street of New Haven, who died there 22 April 1674.

We have one other set of New England ancestors, or at least so closely connected with New England we can count them as such. James McEvers and Louisa Howard were married in Columbia County, New York, within a few miles of the Massachusetts line, and he served in the Revolutionary War from Hancock, Massachusetts. He later drew a pension for his services. After the War, he lived in New York, Vermont, Ohio, and Illinois, where our Horace Roberts and Harriet McEvers (granddaughter of James and Louisa) were married.

In 1840 Horace and Harried joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as did Horace's father, Ephraim Roberts, Jr., and several siblings. In 1851, Horace and Harriet arrived in Provo, Utah, where both remained firm in the Mormon faith until their deaths.

We, the descendants of Horace and Harriet truly have a noble heritage, with its New England Puritan beginnings, its mid-west union through the marriage of Horace and Harriet, its mid-west Mormon beginnings, and its Western blossoming and expansion under their influence and the influence of the Gospel. ("Our Heritage" written by George Olin Zabriskie, November 1967.)