Rev250: The Two Dozen Women and Children in the Families of Robert “King” Hooper & Colonel Jeremiah Lee during the American Revolution

Before and during colonial America’s eight-year Revolution, the family of Robert “King” Hooper included four wives in sequence, and 11 children by just one –– his second wife, Ruth, during their 28 years of marriage. *

In this illustrated talk you will meet all 15 Hoopers, plus 4 more who joined the family when Hooper’s third wife (Hannah) entered his life and his two elegant homes in Marblehead and Danvers at the peak of both Hooper’s and his town’s commercial prosperity in the 1700s –– before the storm of rebellion gained momentum as Britain’s Parliament imposed its series of despised tax acts starting in 1765. Those were followed by disastrous economic sanctions in 1774 & 1775 that sparked the devastating civil war that we now know as the American Revolution. It would last eight long years, bringing to ruin all that Hooper had been so instrumental in creating in Marblehead.

You will also learn how Robert’s wife Ruth Swett, the mother of all 11 of Hooper’s children, was related to Martha, the wife of rebel Patriot leader Colonel Jeremiah Lee, and the mother of all 9 of their offspring.

In 1774 and 1775, on the brink of the war that created a new nation, but which devastated both Lee and Hooper families and all of Marblehead, these were two principal families of divided loyalties, even among “King” Hooper’s grown children.

(* Note: Those numbers were not unusual for that time. General John Glover and his beloved wife Hannah also had 11 children, and together, the four Glover brothers’ families included six wives and 30 children. The family of the future U.S. Supreme Court justice Joseph Story of Marblehead included his father’s two wives (one before and the other after he moved to Marblehead after his participation in the Boston Tea Party as a Son of Liberty in December 1773), and the 19 children born to them. And in Boston, Paul Revere had 16 children with two wives, in sequence. Elbridge Gerry was also one of 11 children, and had 10 of his own.)