John Wheeler Leavitt was the son of Abiah (Kent) Leavitt Abiah Kent was the daughter of Samuel Kent and Abiah Dwight, who was born in 1704 in Northampton, Massachusetts, where her father Justice Nathaniel Dwight, a trader and surveyor, was then living. Dwight was the progenitor of the Dwight family of Northampton, which produced a succession of major New England divines and Yale College presidents, including Timothy Dwight IV and Timothy Dwight V, named for Nathaniel Dwight's father Timothy, an early Puritan immigrant to Dedham, Massachusetts. and John Leavitt of Suffield, a carpenter, farmer and landowner whose family was among the first settlers of Suffield. John Leavitt's brother Thaddeus,Thaddeus Leavitt's descendants included the American architect Richard Morris Hunt, the Boston painter William Morris Hunt, and the photography pioneer and attorney Leavitt Hunt. a prominent Suffield merchant, was among the eight original purchasers of the Western Reserve from the state of Connecticut in 1796. Other extended family members were also involved in purchase of Western Reserve lands including Oliver Ellsworth, whose son Henry Leavitt Ellsworth later traveled to the Reserve to oversee family land grants, staying at the inn belonging to his cousin John Leavitt.
