Copied from The History of New HAven...1918....hope someone is interested....I have 2 Yales in my line..cousins of Elihu...D. Hanna ""But all this while, and even when, thirty years after he first sailed up the clay-banked creek, disappointed John Davenport took his books and beliefs to Boston, burying his ambitions behind him, fate was laying the foundation for the better union that was to be. When in 1637 Theophilus Eaton joined his fortunes with his old playmate of the earlier days at Coventry for an excursion to the New World, he long had been a prosperous merchant in London, and was married to his second wife. She had been the widow of David Yale of Denbighshire, and by him had two sons, Thomas and David Yale. There was also a daughter, who later married the Edward Hopkins of the original Davenport party. Hopkins lost his heart to Hartford before the New Haven settlement was made, however, and prospering greatly there, returned to London in 1654 with a consideralbe fortune, which he seems to have added to later. He was the patron of the Hopkins Grammer School in New Haven. John Davenport had asked him to give his money for the college project instead, and had he done so, this might have been Hopkins instead of Yale College. It was not until sixty-four years later that the son of Thomas Yale, Boston born, London trained, made fabulously wealthy as an East India Company protected plunderer in Old Madras, and later governor of the English trading post, Fort St. George, was moved by the strange intervention of Cotton Mather and the perfectly understandable urging of New Haven's London agent, Jeremial Dummer, to part with a modicum of his wealth for the struggling collegiate school. After a stormy sixteen years in excile, it had become safely settled in New Haven. In Elihu Yales's gift - small enough compensation for the immortal gain of giving name to the college - it is possible to see rather the fullfillment of fate's purpose than the great enrichment of Yale. The securing of funds which made possible the winning of their fight to bring the college to New Haven had not been the work of a minute. It was gradually that the campaing of Dummer and the others (John Davenport, Theophilus Eaton) on the side had led up to Elihu Yale. But looking back now, it is easy to receive the impression that the alliance of New Haven and Yale was predestined from the first." pg. 9-10 A Modern History of New Haven and Eastern New Haven County. Everett G. Hill, (editor of the New Haven Register), vl. 1, S.J. Clarke Publ. Co., NY, 1918