Family-histories and genealogies : containing a series of ...

". . . twenty
mt^in=mouou
of the daughters of Pitkins married clergymen, and ten of the
sons of Pitkins married daughters of clergymen ;
adding
to these thirty ministers be-
fore mentioned, we find sixty clergymen directly or nearly connected with the family.
"Mr. J. O. Goodwin, in his 'History of East Hartford,' says (p. 225) : 'Seldom
is it the fortune of any family to have numbered so many individuals raised to places
of distinction in the affairs of a State, by their own abilities, as in the case of the Pitkin
family of Hartford, East Side. No other family in our commonwealth stood so con-
stantly and for so long a time in the front of current events, unless it were the
Wolcott family of Windsor, which was also remarkable for its number of prominent
men.'
"From the charter of the Connecticut Colony, in 1662, to its formation as a
State, in 1776, and the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, in 1788,
until 1812, a period of one hundred and fifty years, the Colony was annually repre-
sented by a member of the Pitkin family in the Assembly of the Colony, or the
Governor's Council, or in the Governor's chair, and the State, in the House or in the
Senate, and in the Speaker's chair. This representation continued with but few
omissions till 1842, a period of one hundred and eighty years. We question if a
parallel case can be cited in the history of any family in any State."
One of the most prominent families of Pitkin descent is that of the
late Hon. Roger Sherman Baldwin, Governor of Connecticut and United
States Senator, whose wife. Miss Emily Perkins by birth, a granddaughter,
as we have said, of Rev. Timothy Pitkin of Farmington, Conn., was a
noble, very talented and most excellent woman, whom we shall always
remember as one of the most valued friends of our lifetime. Her son
Simeon E. Baldwin Esq., Professor of Constitutional and Mercantile Law,
etc., in the Yale Law School, one of the foremost lawyers of his native
State, and deserving of any official position in the gift of his fellow-citizens ;
her other surviving son, Mr. George William Baldwin, who, having left the
practice of law with honor, has been, for several years, gathering riches of
knowledge and culture by travels all over Europe, and in lands of ancient
civilization in Asia and Africa ;
her
daughter Mrs. Elizabeth Wooster
Whitney, the wife of our foremost American orientalist and linguist
Prof. William Dwight Whitney of Yale University ;
213
and her other daughter