of fidelity at a court held on May 2d, 1648.
He died in 1669. His son William, who was born in 1632, was probably
also a native of England. He married Sarah Thomas in 1658, and died in
1689.
Thomas Wilmot, his son, was born in 1679. He married Mary Lines, and
their son Ezekiel was born in 1708. Ezekiel Wilmot and his wife Beulah
were the parents of Lemuel, who was born in 1743. Lemuel Wilmot married
Elizabeth Street, and William, the father of the subject of this
biography, was their son. William Wilmot married Hannah Bliss, a
daughter of the Hon. Daniel Bliss, a Massachusetts Loyalist, who became
a member of the council of New Brunswick and was the father of John
Murray Bliss, one of the judges of the supreme court of that province.
His grandfather was Colonel John Murray, a Massachusetts Loyalist, who
was for many years a member of the general court of that colony and who
became a mandamus councillor. It will thus be seen that Lemuel Wilmot
came from the best New England stock, and that his connections were
highly respectable and even distinguished. He was proud of his New
England descent, and claimed the usual ancestor from among the
passengers of the _Mayflower_ who landed at Plymouth in 1620. If this
claim is correct, his descent from the Pilgrim Fathers must have been
through the female line, and no record of it has been preserved. The
matter is not of much consequence at the present day, for the Wilmots
have made a record in their province far more distinguished than that
which they won in New England, for they have given to New Brunswick five
members of the legislature, a senator and member of the House of Commons
of Canada, two members of the executive of New Brunswick, and one of the
privy council of Canada, an attorney-general and a provincial secretary
of New Brunswick and two lieutenant-governors.
{LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR CARLETON}
The system of government which existed in all the British North American
colonies at the time when L. A. Wilmot was born was practically the
same. New Brunswick had been separated from Nova Scotia in 1784, and, in
the autumn of that year, its first governor was sent out in the person
of Thomas Carleton, a brother of Sir Guy Carleton. Thomas Carleton had
been an officer in one of the regiments which fought during the War of
the Revolution, but he was in no way distinguished, and had no special
qualifications for the position he was called upon to fill. That fact,
however, did no
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