Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, on 5 October 1703, Edwards was the fifth of eleven children and the only son of the Reverend Timothy Edwards and Esther Stoddard Edwards. The family home had been purchased by Edwards's grandfather, Richard Edwards, a wealthy cooper and merchant. Edwards's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Tuttle Edwards, seems to have been of unsound mind, as were some of her siblings: one of her brothers killed one of her sisters, while another sister killed her own child. Edwards's mother was the second of twelve children of the Reverend Solomon Stoddard and Esther Warham Mather Stoddard, who had previously been married to the Reverend Eleasar Mather, the brother of Increase Mather. When Mather died, Solomon Stoddard had been called to fill his pulpit in Northampton, Massachusetts, and, as was not unusual in the early New England church, he had also married the widow. Solomon Stoddard's mother was a niece of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Edwards's elementary schooling was provided by his father. At the age of twelve he recorded detailed observations of rainbows and spiders, drawing "conclusions about their flight." (Some species spin a gossamer to float in the breeze--today called "ballooning.") At thirteen he matriculated at Connecticut's Collegiate School, which had been founded in Killingworth in 1701 and had just settled in New Haven in 1716; in 1718 its name was changed to Yale College (it became Yale University in 1864).
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