Boston - Freedom Trail - King's Chapel and Burying Ground - Winthrop family tomb

Within this tomb are buried the following members of the Winthrop family: John Winthrop (1588-1649), John Winthrop the Younger (1606-1676), Major. Gen. Fitz John Winthrop (1638-1707), Maj. Gen. Wait Still Winthrop (1642-1717), Adam Winthrop (1647-1700), Colonel Adam Winthrop (1676-1743), Prof. John Winthrop (1714-1779), Anne Winthrop (1756-1789), wife of David Sears, Thomas Lindall Winthrop (1760-1841), Francis William Winthrop (1799-1819), and Thomas Lindall Winthrop (1834-1920)

John Winthrop led a group of Puritans to the New World, joining the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629. He was elected governor of his colony on April 8, 1630. Between 1631 and 1648 he was voted out of governorship and re-elected a total of 12 times. Winthrop subscribed to the Puritan belief that the Anglican Church had to be cleansed of Catholic ritual, convinced that God would punish England for its heresy. The New World served, in his mind, as a shelter away from England while they incurred God's wrath. Winthrop is most famous for his City upon a Hill sermon, as it is popularly known (its real title was A Model of Christian Charity), in which he declared that the Puritan colonists emigrating to the New World were part of a special pact with God to create a holy community. This speech is often seen as a forerunner to the concept of American exceptionalism. The speech is also well known for arguing that the wealthy had a holy duty to look after the poor.

His son, John Winthrop the Younger, John Winthrop the Younger, was the chief founder of Agawam (now Ipswich, MassachusettS) in 1633 and served as governor of Connecticut in 1635. Fitz-John Winthrop, served as Governor of Connecticut from 1698-1707. Wait Still Winthrop served on the Massachusetts Governors Council in 1691, as Chief Justice of Massachusetts and as a Major General in the Massachusetts Militia. The two brothers were sons of John the Younger, and grandsons of John.

The Winthrops are part of the great Dudley-Winthrop family. John Kerry, Massachusets senator from 1985 to the present and 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate, is the 8th great grandson of John Winthrop. The trees run off between the two. Thomas Lindall Winthrop I married Elizabeth Bowdoin Temple, the granddaughter of James Bowdoin, also Governor of Massachusetts, which makes Bowdoin Kerry's 5th great grandfather. Kerry is the 3rd great grandson of Jeremiah Mason, a congressman and Attorney General from New Hampshire, who was the great uncle of Jane Appleton, who married President Franklin Pierce. Kerry is the 4th cousin twice removed of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose 5th cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was married to Edith Carow, who was the 3rd great granddaughter of Reverend Jonathan Edwards, who was the grandson of Revered Stoddard, whose mother was John Winthrop's uncle. Reverend Edwards's son-in-law was Reverend Aaron Burr St, who was the father of Vice President Aaron Burr. Kerry's 7th great grandfather, Thomas Dudley, was also the 3rd great grandfather of Robert Charles Winthrop and the 5th great grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. His granddaughter, Ann Dudley was John Winthrop's wife. Not to be confused with Anne Dudlet, the poet, who became Anne Bradstreet, when she married Simon Bradstreet, also a Massachusetts governor. The Bradstreet's were 8th great grandparents to President Herbert Hoover and Chief Justice David HAckett Souter.

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King's Chapel Burial Ground is Boston's first and oldest burying place, dating back to just a few months after the town was settled in 1630. Until 1688, when land from the oldest section was taken to build the adjacent King's Chapel, this burying place was called Johnson's Burying Ground after Isaac Johnson, an early settler and the first Chief Justice of Boston. Johnson once owned the property and requested to be buried here. Held in such high esteem by his fellow townsmen that they requested to be buried by his side, the land was appropriated for common burial. Serving as Boston's only burial ground for nearly 30 years, overcrowding quickly became a problem, which resulted in town fathers allocating land for Copp's Hill Burying Ground in 1659 and Granary Burying Ground in 1660. General interments continued until 1795 and burials in family tombs into the 19th century. In the early 1800s, many of the gravestones were moved from their original position and placed in rows, so it is impossible to tell the exact location of some of the graves.

King's Chapel Burying Ground is the final resting place of thousands of Boston settlers, including many anchoring members of Boston's seventeenth and eighteenth-century society. The honor role includes Hezekiah Usher, the first book seller in Boston; Robert Keayne, the founder of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company; John Proctor, a "Writing Master" at the original Boston Latin School; religious icons Reverend John Cotton and Reverend John Davenport; William Dawes, who rode with Paul Revere to Lexington on April 18, 1775; Elizabeth Pain, who many believed was the prototype for the Hester Prynne character in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and Mary Chilton, the first woman to step foot off the Mayflower in Plymouth Colony in 1620. The oldest extant gravemarker in this site commemorates the life of William Paddy (1657)