Titus Hosmer

Titus Hosmer (1736 – August 4 1780) was an American lawyer from Middletown, Connecticut. He was a delegate for Connecticut to the Continental Congress in 1778, where he signed the Articles of Confederation.

Titus was born in West Hartford, Connecticut, attended Yale and graduated in 1757. He read for the law, was admitted to the bar, and began a practice in Middletown, Connecticut. He married Lydia Lord on November 29 1761 in Middletown. Their son Stephen Hosmer would also become a lawyer, and was the Chief Justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court.

Hosmer was elected to the Connecticut state Assembly annually from 1773 to 1778, and served as their speaker in 1777.

In May 1778 he became a member of the State Senate, and remained in that office until he died. Later in 1778, the joint state legislature also sent him one of their delegates to the Continental Congress. Titus died at Middletown on August 4 1780 of undisclosed causes, and is buried in the Mortimer Cemetery there.

The Hosmer family is traced to Rotherfield in Sussex (and much earlier to Dorset), where a certain Alexander Hosmer was native before a marian martyr in nearby Lewes and the family consequently moved to Kent in the following generations. His colonial ancestor was a Roundhead in the New Model Army, who left Hawkhurst in Kent for New England upon the English Restoration. He had a Whig relative who fought and was mortally wounded in the Battle of Lexington and Concord against Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland. There is a Hosmer Corner in Hampden County, Massachusetts named for the family although the Hosmers are more renowned as founders of Hartford, Connecticut.

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