John Leverett was baptized 7 July 1616 at St Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire. His father, Thomas Leverett, was a close associate of John Cotton, the church's Puritan pastor, and served as one of the church's elders. Nothing is known of his mother, Anne Fisher, beyond that she bore her husband 16 children. Of John Leverett's youth nothing is known prior to the family's departure for the New World in 1633. By the early 1630s Leverett's father was an alderman in Boston, and had acquired, in partnership with John Beauchamp of the Plymouth Council for New England, a grant now known as the Waldo Patent for land in what is now the state of Maine. When the family arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony it settled in the capital, also called Boston. Leverett married Hannah Hudson in 1639. They had a son, Hudson, in 1640; Hannah died in 1643. In 1640 Leverett was made a freeman.
