John Gardner

John Gardner (September 17, 1697 – January 1764) served for more than eight years as the deputy governor of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, and was also a Chief Justice of the colony's Superior Court. Ancestry John Gardner was the son of Joseph and Catharine (Holmes) Gardner of Newport, and the grandson of George Gardiner who was an early settler of Portsmouth in 1638. One of his great grandfathers was Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist minister in Newport, who was severely whipped in Boston for his religious views and activism; and another was Randall Holden who was a supporter of the dissident minister Anne Hutchinson and who signed the Portsmouth Compact establishing the first government in the Rhode Island colony. One of his great great grandmothers was Frances Latham, the wife of William Dungan, who has been called "the mother of governors," reputed to have had 14 descendants who were governors, deputy governors, or spouses of governors. Political life