Jane C. Master and Richard P. Hunt were married in 1845. Jane was a Quaker from Philadelphia and joined Richard in Waterloo, where he had lived since 1821. By 1848 the Hunts had two young children -- William, born in 1847, and one-month-old Jane. Another child, George, was born in 1851.

The Hunts were also raising the children from Richard's previous marriage to Sarah M'Clintock, a relative of Thomas. That five-year marriage had ended in 1842 with Sarah's death. The children -- Richard, born in 1838; Mary M., 1839; and Sarah M., 1841 -- provided a tangible link of kinship between the Hunts and M'Clintocks. Throughout the time both families lived in Waterloo, they shared reform and business interests.

Richard held other area kinship ties. At 24, he had moved to Waterloo and opened a dry-goods store. Within eight years, he had petitioned for the incorporation of the village, served on its first Board as treasurer, became a village trustee, and was elected the first supervisor of the Town of Waterloo. His first marriage to Matilda Kendig in 1823 may have won him community acceptance. She was a native of Waterloo, descended from two prominent founding families. The marriage gave him the opportunity to become a civic and business leader. Their nine-year marriage, lasting until her death in 1832, produced no known children. Two years later, Hunt married again, but his new wife, Anne Underhill, died within five months.

The Hunts' Quaker ties and Richard's previous marriages incorporated the family into strong business, religious, and reform networks. In the two decades after Richard sold his store in 1829, he invested in real estate, developed residential and industrial properties, and purchased farmland near Waterloo, where he built a brick house. The Hunts' radical Quaker beliefs connected them religiously, socially, and politically to abolition, woman's rights, and other social reform movements.

Richard's sisters, Lydia Mount and Hannah Plant, and niece, Mary Vail, all lived in the Waterloo area, attended the Convention, and signed the Declaration of Sentiments.

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