John Morgan was born in 1721 in Beverly, Massachusetts. He married Margaret Larcum on Christmas Day, 1745. They had one child, Cornelius, in 1747. Margaret died about sixteen months later.
John remarried to Rebecca Coming in 1750, when he was 29 and she was about 22. They had nine more children in Beverly: Hannah (1752), John (1754), Ebenezer (1756), Margaret (1759), William (1761), Sarah (1763), Ephriam (1765), Zachariah (1768), Rebecca (1768), and Joseph (1772).
John was a "Minuteman" during the brief period of that citizen-soldier organization's existence. When the alarm went out on the eighteenth of April in 1775 there were many more horsemen than Paul Revere spreading the word to every Middlesex, village and farm. Beverly was one of the villages, and it sent 122 Minutemen, including John Morgan, to battle the British as they retreated to Boston from Lexington and Concord. The Minutemen introduced a new tactic in warfare that day, firing from behind stone fences and trees rather than massing in the open and firing in volleys or charging with bayonets as the Europeans were accustomed to doing.
John Morgan was 54 years old then. He had marched more than 25 miles to reach the site of the battle. He may have concluded that he had done his part, for there is no record of his further military service. His son Ebenezer, however, served in the revolutionary army and perished at age 19. John Morgan, Jr., died of cancer in 1792 at the age of 71.
DOB estimated, based on age of spouse.
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Featured National Park champion connections: John is 13 degrees from Theodore Roosevelt, 20 degrees from Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, 12 degrees from George Catlin, 15 degrees from Marjory Douglas, 22 degrees from Sueko Embrey, 12 degrees from George Grinnell, 25 degrees from Anton Kröller, 13 degrees from Stephen Mather, 21 degrees from Kara McKean, 15 degrees from John Muir, 15 degrees from Victoria Hanover and 25 degrees from Charles Young on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.