William Leete, Governor of the New Haven Colony; Governor of Connecticut

- 1683

• Name	William Leete  [1, 2]
  Suffix	Governor of the New Haven Colony; Governor of Connecticut
  Birth	Dodington, Huntingdonshire, England   [3, 4, 5]
  Gender	Male
  Death	16 Apr 1683	Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut   [3, 4, 5]
  Person ID	I12213	Ancestry of PNH, TNH, and others
  Last Modified	15 Sep 2025

  
  

  Father	John Leete,   b. Bef 13 May 1575   d. Between 1648 and 1654 (Age > 72 years)
  Mother	Anne Shute   d. Aft 1649
  Family ID	F25321	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart

  
  

  Family 1	Anna Payne,   b. Bef 31 Jul 1621   d. 1 Sep 1668 (Age > 47 years)
  Marriage	1 Aug 1636	Hail Weston, Huntingdonshire, England   [4, 5]
  Children	+ 1. Abigail Leete   d. 9 Apr 1710, Simsbury, Hartford, Connecticut
  Family ID	F7082	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	15 Sep 2025

  
  

  Family 2	Sarah   d. 3 Feb 1673, New Haven, New Haven, Connecticut
  Marriage	7 Apr 1670
  Family ID	F11385	Group Sheet  |  Family Chart
  Last Modified	2 Dec 2018

  
  

• Notes

  Third governor of the New Haven colony, 1661-1664. 22nd governor of the Connecticut colony, 1767-1683. He has had a variety of lengthy medieval ancestries attributed to him, all of which have been punctured by later research. But he was clearly gentry, and five generations of ancestors, back to Ralph Staverton of Strode Hall, Berkshire, are well-proved.

  
  

• Sources

  [S1648] The Woodbridge Record: Being an Account of the Descendants of the Rev. John Woodbridge, of Newbury, Mass.. "Compiled from the papers left by the late Louis Mitchell, Esquire." New Haven, Connecticut, 1883. [S6118] Mary K. Talcott, "Genealogy of the Woodbridge Family." The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 32:292, July 1879. [S2303] George E. McCracken, "John Brown's Body." The American Genealogist 35:19, January 1959. [S8561] Frederick Lewis Weis, "Descent of William Leete, Governor of Connecticut, from the Emperor Charlemagne." The American Genealogist 31:114, 1955. [S53] The Magna Charta Sureties, 1215: The Barons Named in the Magna Charta, 1215, and Some of Their Descendants Who Settled in America During the Early Colonial Years by Frederick Lewis Weis. Fifth edition, with additions and corrections by Walter Lee Sheppard, Jr. and William R. Beal. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1999.