John Kelly was one of the selectmen of Dover, N. H., who aided in taking the census in October, 1775. He served in the state Legislature four years, and from the records seemed to have been an active, public-spirited citizen. John Kelly was a ratepayer in Plaistow and Atkinson in 1786.
A John Kelly in Salem appears on a petition for the formation of one or more counties in 1769. Samuel Kelly was one of his associates. John Kelly renders an account of individual losses which he met at Ticonderoga. John Kelly of Dover, in 1782, furnished an affidavit in relation to the identity of a soldier. John Kelly of Deerfield was a recruit for the Continental army in 1780. John Kelly was one of the selectmen of Salem in 1775.
John E. Kelly was one of Warner’s selectmen in 1801. John Kelly of North Hampton was one of Captain Parsons’ company, Colonel Runnells’ regiment, at Charleston, in 1781.
John Kelly of New York was granted 69,100 acres of land in Lamoiville, Vt., in 1787. In 1791 he was given 30,000 acres more. In both cases the grants were made by the legislature of Vermont. This John Kelly must have been one of the “Royal Order of Patroons.” Kellyburg, Kellyvale, and Kelly Grant marked his progress in the Green Mountain state. John Kelly, a native of Plaistow, graduated from Amherst College in 1825. He lived in Chester in 1833. The history of the town speaks of him in the highest terms.
Ezekiel Kelly, a native of Newbury, Mass., was in Chester, N. H., in 1784. Col. Israel W. Kelly resided there in 1810, and Ephraim Kelly was one of the selectmen in 1825.
Rev. John Kelly of Hampstead was of the sixth generation of John Kelly of Newbury, Mass., who came over in 1635. He had five sons and seven daughters. He died in Hampstead in 1848. Three of his sons were college graduates. He wrote a history of Hampstead. He was pastor of the church in that town from 1792 to his death in 1848, fifty-six years.
The ways of the Kellys were not always smooth, for Brewster’s Rambles Around Portsmouth says, that in July, 1686, John Kelly and his family were ordered to give security or leave town, a survival of the custom in vogue in Boston and probably introduced to New Hampshire when the Province came under the control of Massachusetts Bay.
John Kelly was a Revolutionary soldier and died in Raymond. A John Kelly was one of Windham’s first settlers, and a type of the late historian Morrison’s so-called “pure-blooded Scotch Irishman.”
John Kelly was a member of the governor’s council in 1846. John Kelly was register of probate for Hillsborough County, N. H., 1831 to 1837. John Kelly was register of deeds in Rockingham County from 1832 to 1837.
Joseph Kelly was one of the selectmen of Sunbudy in 1757. Joseph Kelly was a prisoner in Amherst jail in 1774. The occasion for it was an assault he made on John Holman. It seems clear that the cause of the trouble was political, for the Provincial papers contain several petitions from some of the towns of Hillsborough County asking for his release. He was a Nottingham man, and from the records seemed to be in hot water a good part of the time. He raised a company in June, 1775, but his men refused to allow Major Hobart to muster them into the service. His troubles extended to 1787.