Week 3

The person I picked to research from the Old Burying Ground is Joseph Coollidge, Sr, who shared my last initial and my birthday of May 31st. He was born in 1666 to Simon Coollidge and died on December 17th, 1737. His WikiTree profile lists his occupation as a tailor, backed up by a genealogy published in the The New England Historical and Genealogical Register. He became the Deacon of the First Church in Cambridge on January 22, 1718, after having moved there in 1694. He was known to be a selectman in the years 1713, 1714, and 1730. 

Joseph married Rebecca Frost (December 3, 1669 - July 1, 1750) around 1695, with whom he had six children, all born in Cambridge. Their first daughter, Rebecca Coollidge was baptised on December 8, 1697, but died soon thereafter. Her sister took the same name and lived from June 4, 1699 to June 5, 1754. Between 1701 and 1707, two more Coollidge children, Joseph and Mary, had been born and died as infants. Stephen was born on April 18, 1708 and lived until May 5, 1758. Their last child, Mary, also took the name of a deceased sister and lived from January 15, 1711 to August 10, 1752. 

Rebecca the younger married Edward Michael Wigglesworth on September 10, 1729. He was the first appointee to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard, a position he maintained for over four decades. He is recorded as being a slaveowner between 1733 and 1756. Wigglesworth Hall, a freshman dorm in the Yard, is named after "the descendants of Michael Wigglesworth, a Puritan minister who attended Harvard College," who was Rebecca's father-in-law. The college acknowledges his son, Rebecca's husband, as well as "grandson Edward Wigglesworth (A.B. 1749) [who] was elected second Hollis Professor of Divinity on the death of his father in 1765."