Excerpt from Richard Henry Dana a Biography, Vol. 1 of 2 Richard Henry Dana, the younger of the name, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the first day of August, 1815. He came from an old Massachusetts stock, long resident in the town of his birth, the early records of which contain mention of a Richard Dana in 1640, though how long he had then been in the country, or whence or why he came, does not appear. It has always been the family tradition that this first Richard was of French descent, and it is still thought probable that his ancestors were French Vaudois dwelling in the valleys of Piedmont, where Danas are still found whose families can be traced back for centuries, and whence other Danas may well have been driven by those religious persecutions of which that region was the frequent scene. Whether of Italian or English, and remotely, perhaps, as the name might seem to imply, of Scandinavian origin, the first Richard had a grandson of the same name who was in his time (1700-1772) a prominent lawyer, and in his latter years an active patriot, though he died before the revolutionary troubles culminated. He married (1737) a sister of Edmund Trowbridge, the eminent colonial judge, and by her, in 1743, had a son, Francis, who was a delegate in 1777-9 and '84 from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress, and was appointed by it in 1780 the first American Minister to the Court of Russia. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.