THE REV. ELIJAH FITCH was born in Windham, Ct., in 1745.  His first American ancestor was the Rev. James Fitch, who was the first Congregational pastor of Norwich, Ct., and who emigrated from England about 1638.  His 4th son, was Capt. John Fitch, who settled at Windham, Ct., who was the father of Capt. John Fitch, jr., who was the father of the subject of this memoir.

He was educated at Yale, and received an honorary degree of A.M. from Harvard in 1770.  He became a clergyman at Hopkinton, Mass., where he died on the 16th of Dec., 1788, in the seventeenth year of his ministry.  He married a Miss Hannah Fuller of Hampton, Ct., who survived him and who died his widow about 1823, at the age 80 years.  They had four children:  John, who became a Congregational minister and was first settled as pastor of the Congregational Church at Danville, Vt.; Nancy, who was never married but continued to care for her aged mother during her life; Elijah, who became a farmer and a deacon of the Congregational Church of Hopkinton, Mass.; and Betcy, who became the wife of the Rev. Nathaniel Rawson, the first pastor of the Congregational Church at Hardwick, Vt.

He wrote a poem addressed to Youth, in five cantos (a) entitled "The Beauties of Religion," and a short poem styled The Choice, which were printed in Providence in 1789.  The design of these essays is to paint religion in her native beauties, and are mainly designed to give youth just views of religion, and to persuade them to love and practise it.  The subject required, the author wrote, the study of perspicuity more than elegance, and truth more than poetical embelishments.  In the poem the desires of the soul and the sufficiency of the Gospel to supply its longings, the goodness of God in the material creation and the need of religion to hallow it to our use, the happiness of a holy life, the evils produced by sin, especially war, are enforced with occasional narrative episodes; the soliloquy of an infidel who after a debauch awakes with a resolution to pursue nothing but the pleasures of the world but is unable to escape the rebukes of conscience, and expires in misery; an animated description then follows of the beauty and variety of nature and the sufficiency of harmless pleasures to secure happiness.  In the last canto the "Soliloquy of a Believer" is given, in which which the happiness of a holy life of devout meditation and participation in the ordinances of public worship is dwelt upon with varied and excelent language.

(a) The word "book" in the book, is here changed to canto as a better description of the several divisions of a book of about 200 octavo pages.

WILLIAM FULLER, at the age of 25 years, came from England in 1634.  Lived in Ipswich, Mass.;  married in 1648, Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Emerson, (an ancestor of R.W. Emerson); the 7th of his children was,

JOSEPH FULLER, born in 1661;  married Mary Hayward in 1685; the 4th of his children was,

JOHN FULLER, who married 1st Mary Hoyward in 1727, who died in 1728.  2d Hannah Lord in 1730; removed from Ipswich to Hampton, Conn. about 1740.  The 6th and youngest of his children was,

HANNAH FULLER, born in 1743; married to Rev. Elijah Fitch in 1766, who setled in Hopkinton, Mass.