Biography
Denton was born around 1626 in Yorkshire, England. He was the son of the Reverend Richard Denton, one of America's earliest Presbyterian ministers. Many Denton family genealogies claim Daniel's mother was Helen Windebank. In the 1640s he accompanied his father to Massachusetts, Connecticut, and eventually Long Island. In 1650 he was made town clerk of Hempstead, where his father was a pastor, and in 1656 he held the same position in the town of Jamaica. When his father relocated to Halifax, Nova Scotia (or Halifax,Yorks, England), Denton remained on Long Island, and in 1664 he became one of the grantees of a patent at Elizabethtown, New Jersey. In 1665 and 1666 he served as justice of the peace in New York. Around 1659, Denton married Abigail Stevenson, who bore three children, and from whom he was divorced in 1672. The two elder children, Daniel and Abigail, remained with their father, while the infant daughter, Mercy, accompanied her mother, who subsequently remarried. Denton left New York for England in 1670 (which may have occasioned his divorce), and there he evidently participated in settlement enterprises and possibly in the newly acquired (by the English) fur trade.
Denton Green, in Hempstead, NY is named for Reverend Richard Denton, Daniel Denton's father.
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