Lott 1865

John Lott was born in 1795 in the Mohawk Valley of New York, a region long shaped by Dutch settlement and agricultural life. He descended from a Lott family whose roots traced back to the seventeenth-century Dutch community of Flatbush on Long Island, itself part of the earlier migration from the Dutch Republic to New Netherland. Raised within this Dutch-influenced rural culture, John grew up in a world accustomed to mobility in pursuit of land and opportunity.

In 1821, John married Catherine Jane (Johnson) Brown, a young widow born in New Jersey, likely also of Dutch background. After a brief period in western New York, they joined the steady westward movement of the 1820s, settling in Plymouth, Wayne County, Michigan, where they cleared land and raised a large family under frontier conditions.

John’s death in 1840 left Catherine widowed with young children. Following multiple relocations and another marriage, in 1865 Catherine moved to Burlington, Kane County, Illinois to be near her daughters. Her move continued a pattern of steady migration that ultimately rooted the family in the developing Midwest.