Hancock (John) is born in Quincy (then Braintree).

The son of Rev. John and Mary (Hawke) Hancock, John Hancock is raised by his uncle, Thomas Hancock, at 29 Beacon Street, graduates from Boston Latin School and Harvard College, joins his uncle’s shipping business, and subsequently inherits one of the largest fortunes in New England. He marries Dorothy Quincy in 1775, serves in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1766-72), and as president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress (1774-75), and the Continental Congress (1775-77), where he becomes the first to sign the Declaration of Independence in 1776.* Hancock serves as governor of Massachusetts (1781-85 and 1787-93) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1785-86). He dies in Braintree on October 8, 1793, and is buried in the Granary Burying Ground. Henry Cabot Lodge later writes, “There have been but few men in history who have achieved so much fame, and whose names are so familiar, who at the same time really did so little. He was valuable chiefly from his picturesqueness.”