was the second wife of his paternal grandfather. According to John Howard Raven and William H.S. Demarest, Hardenbergh obtained an education from the Kingston Academy, in Kingston, Ulster County, New York. However, the Kingston Academy was not established until 1773. Kingston did, however, have a small school with a Dutch schoolmaster founded in 1722 by the Trustees of the Freeholders and Commonality of the Town of Kingston—an organization chartered by colonial governor Thomas Dongan to provide for the free education of Kingston's children. In his late teens, he travelled to Somerset County, New Jersey to receive religious and theological instruction from the Reverend John Frelinghuysen, who was serving Dutch Reformed congregations in the Raritan valley of central New Jersey. John Frelinghuysen died in 1754, and at the age of twenty, Hardenbergh married Frelinghuysen's widow, Dinah Van Bergh (c.1723–1807) on 18 March 1756 at Raritan, New Jersey. She had two children with Frelinghuysen before his death. Born in Amsterdam, Dinah was the daughter of Louis Van Bergh, a wealthy merchant who was "engaged in East India trade." Hardenbergh proposed as Dinah was strongly considering returning to the Netherlands with her two children. Her diary, dating from February 1746 to late 1747, is held by Special Collections and University Archives, at the Archibald S. Alexander Library of Rutgers University. Hardenbergh and his wife had nine children: Maria (born 1757–1789), Laura (born 1757–1785), Johannes (1759–1798), Elinor (born 1760), Dina (born 1762), Jacob Rutsen (1763–1764), Rachel (born 1765–1845), Jacob Rutsen (born 1768), and Lewis (1771–1810). Hardenbergh's step-son, Frederick Frelinghuysen (1753–1804), served in the Provincial Congress of New Jersey, state legislature, and was elected a United States Senator. He also served as a military officer in the Revolution and in the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) when he attained the rank of major general. Career as a minister Hardenbergh studied theology under the Reverend John Frelinghuysen, a Reformed clergyman who served several congregations located in the valley of the Raritan River in Somerset County, New Jersey, at the village of Raritan, Bedminster, Millstone, Neshanic, North Branch, and New Brunswick. These congregations had been served by Frelinghuysen's father, the Reverend Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen (1691–1749), who rose to prominence during the First Great Awakening. The First Great Awakening was an evangelical revival in the 1730s and 1740s that revitalized Christian beliefs in Protestant Europe and the North American colonies through powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of deep