Thomas Hazard (1610 - after 1677) was one of the nine founding settlers of Newport on Aquidneck Island (Rhode Island) in the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. He settled in Boston and Portsmouth before settling Newport, but later returned to Portsmouth. His descendants include Commodores Oliver Hazard Perry and Matthew C. Perry and three colonial Rhode Island deputy governors. Life Thomas Hazard was a founding settler of Newport, Rhode Island, who, upon arriving from England, first settled in Boston, and then came to Portsmouth before settling in Newport. Moriarity suggested that he had come from Dorsetshire, England, but Anderson concluded there is insufficient evidence for this assertion. He was a ship carpenter, and was in Boston in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as early as 1635, and admitted to the church there on 22 May 1636. He was made a freeman of Boston in 1636, but by 1638 he was admitted as an inhabitant of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island, where many followers of Anne Hutchinson had settled. On 28 April 1639, he and eight others signed a compact, and soon established the town of Newport at the southern end of Aquidneck Island. Once there, he was named as one of four assigned to proportion the land, and to collect four pence for each acre laid out. In September he was made a freeman of Newport, and the following March was a member of the general court of elections. On 20 June 1644 he sold to Henry Bull certain parcels of land that had been granted to him by the freemen of Newport. In 1655 Hazard was once again in Portsmouth, where his name appears on a list of freemen, and where, in 1658, he deeded land to Stephen Wilcox, who married his daughter Hannah. The same year he was chosen to sit on the colony's petit jury, but was fined five shillings for not serving. Hazard wrote a will on 30 November 1669, naming his son and his three married daughters. His circumstances later changed, and on 13 November 1676 he wrote another will with much different provisions (see Family, below). He was still alive on 6 August 1677 when he further modified his estate plans. Austin has him paying a tax in 1680, but Anderson does not find this to be valid. Family Hazard first married a woman named Martha, about whom little is known. Based on the