Author: Blodget, Joseph
Biography:
BLODGET, Joseph (1757-1833: ancestry.com)
The son of Joshua and Hannah (Alden) Blodget or Blodgett, he was born in Stafford CT on 10 May 1757. For six months in 1776 he served in the Revolutionary army, but he then went on to Dartmouth and graduated in 1783. After taking orders he became the minister of the Congregational church in Greenwich, Hampshire MA in 1786 and served till his death in Dec. 1833. No record of his marriage has been found but it appears from land purchases and from his son's marriage record that he was married to Jerusha (birth name possibly Burr) and with her had at least three children, two daughters and a son, Erastus, born in 1798. Blodget is not known to have published much more than his consolation to bereaved parents in the volume of poems by Ann Mason, but on the same theme of the death of children there is a broadside poem "written upon the death of Louisa Burroughs," five years old, in 1805. (ancestry.com 26 May 2026; J. G. Holland, History of Western Massachusetts [1855]; WorldCat; Hampshire Gazette 25 Dec. 1833) HJ