Topic: John Hart

John Hart (c. 1711 – May 11, 1779) was a Delegate from New Jersey to the Continental Congress and a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence.

Sources disagree as to John Hart's year and place of birth. Some place his birth as early as 1707 in Stonington, Connecticut; others insist that he was born in 1713, and after his parents had moved to Hopewell Township, New Jersey in what was then Hunterdon County (now part of Mercer County). He was the son of Edward Hart, a farmer, public assessor, Justice of the Peace, and leader of a local militia unit during the French and Indian War, and grandson of John Hart, a carpenter who came to Hopewell from Newtown, Long Island. An earlier ancestor was Edward Hart, the clerk for the town of Flushing on Long Island who authored the Flushing Remonstrance on December 27, 1657, considered the first expression of religious freedom in America. John Hart was very closely related to Peter Marsh.

By 1739 John Hart had acquired his own farm near Hopewell, and in 1741 he married Deborah Scudder. The couple would have thirteen children: Sarah, Jesse, Martha, Nathaniel, John, Susannah, Mary, Abagail, Edward, Scudder, a baby girl, Daniel, and Deborah, of whom only Daniel and Deborah were still minor children at John Hart's death in 1779. Deborah Hart predeceased her husband, dying October 8, 1776.