| Notes |
- He gave his age as 76 in a deposition given in 1677. Although Parke and Jacobus (citation details below) say he emigrated before 1635 and was first at Watertown, then Wethersfield in 1635-36, he appears to first appear on record at Wethersfield on 11 Sep 1636, when he was ordered by the court to help with the inventory of John Oldham. On 11 Jun 1640 he was "convicted before the Court for 'pernitous speaking,' tending to the detriment and dishonor of the commonwealth, fined 40s. and bound over in a bond of £20." In the same year he and others left the Wethersfield church along with the Presbyterian Rev. Richard Denton and began the process of removing to Stamford. In 1643 he was a deputy from Stamford to the New Haven legislature. In 1644 he and several others moved to Newtown, Long Island, and in 1647 he was one of the freeholders participating in the first land division for Hempstead, where he was a magistrate in 1652 and from 1656 on.
He appears to have been a vigorous persecutor of Quakers. E. B. O'Callaghan, in his History of New Netherland (New York: Bartlett and Welford, 1848; volume 2, page 347) relates the following: "Richard Gildersleeve, a magistrate of Heemstede, was one of the most prominent of the persecutors of the new sect. To 'hold the garments of those who stoned the saints,' was not glory enough for him. He pursued them with proclamations, and inflicted on them and their friends pains and penalties without end."
According to Long Island Genealogies by Mary Powell Bunker (Albany: Joel Munsell's Sons, 1895), his wife's name was Experience.
Various sources claim that he and/or his son Richard signed the Hempstead Petition of 1679, claimed by some as the first assertion of the principle "no taxation without representation," but we have been unable to verify this.
A long essay about Richard Gildersleeve by Charles M. Andrews in The New England Magazine, Feb 1893, can be read online here.
Janet and Robert Wolfe's genealogy site contains an excellent, meticulously sourced list of pretty much everything on record about Richard Gildersleeve.
Richard Gildersleeve (~1601-1681)
Anna Gildersleeve (d. ~1684 = John Smith
Miriam Smith = John Williams (d. 1680)
Miriam Williams = Joseph Mott (d. 1735)
Jane Mott = Benjamin Seaman (d. 1729)
Benjamin Seaman (1719-1781) = Elizabeth Mott (1720-1781)
William Seaman (1764-1835) = Elizabeth Brewerton Benson (1771-1840)
Henry John Seaman (1805-1861) = Katherine Sarah Seaman (1813-1896)
Billopp Seaman (1837-1914) = Adeline Stansbury Iucho (1840-1884)
Adeline Iucho Seaman (1867-1948) = Henry Granville Stephens (1862-1946)
Homé Catherine Stephens (1896-1981) = Addams Stratton McAllister (1875-1946)
Homé Stephens McAllister (b. 1925) = George Walter Reitwiesner (1918-1993)
William Addams Reitwiesner (1954-2010), distinguished genealogist
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
Abt 1601 - 1681 (~ 80 years)
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