Hancock family.

The Hancock family of Boston included wealthy colonial merchant Thomas Hancock (1703-1764) and his nephew John Hancock (1737-1793), president of the Second Continental Congress, governor of Massachusetts, and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hancock, the son of the Reverend John and Elizabeth Clark Hancock, was born in 1703 in Lexington, Massachusetts (then a part of the town of Cambridge.) At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to Samuel Gerrish, a Boston bookseller. In 1724, he opened his own bookshop, “The Bible & Three Crowns,” in the North End of Boston. The conditions of trade at that time-the lack of currency and the resort to barter-compelled Thomas Hancock into more varied business activities. Hancock was a partner in a paper mill, exported goods (including codfish, whale oil, log wood, and potash), supplied rum and provisions to the Newfoundland fishing fleet, and owned shares in freighting vessels. During this time Hancock met and went into business with Daniel Henchman, a leading Boston bookseller. They jointly purchased large consignments of paper and supplies, which allowed Hancock to establish his own credit. They also published works on questions of the day. Thomas Hancock married Henchman’s daughter Lydia in 1730.

Between 1746 and 1758 Hancock and his partner, Charles Apthorp, furnished supplies to all the British forces in Nova Scotia. Apthorp died in 1758, and five years later Thomas Hancock, having no children of his own, established his nephew John as his partner. Thomas Hancock's health declined, and he died in1764. He left an estate estimated at £70,000, one of the largest in the colonies at that time.

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