His mother died circa 1745 and his father remarried at Ripton Parish on November 25, 1746, Deborah Beardslee, the daughter of Caleb Beardslee and Elizabeth Booth, who was born on February 1, 1726, at Stratford, Connecticut and died at Hanover Green, Pennsylvania, on August 7, 1802.
He had aspired to further his education and his college tuition was paid for by the inheritance from his grandfather Blackleach's estate.
Professor James Luce Kingsley, in his History of Yale College, remarks of him, that "he had a high reputation for scholarship."
Soon after graduating from Yale College in 1765, he married, as his first wife, Martha Welles[3] (1744 - April 1786) with whom he had twelve children.
[4] One of his sons, Dr. Eli Burritt, graduated from Williams College, class of 1800 and was licensed to practice medicine at Troy, New York, on March 29, 1802, and quickly gained recognition for his medical skills.
Jedidiah Mills, Yale College, 1722, and was licensed to preach in the Congregational Church on February 24, 1768, by the Fairfield East Association of Ministers.
At the beginning of 1779, he was installed as the pastor of the Congregational Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, and while thus employed, having been prominent in his advocacy of the American cause, he was captured, on the early morning of June 18, 1779,[1] and taken to the Sugar House Prison in New York City,[2] where he was detained for about fourteen months, during which time his family took refuge in Pound Ridge, New York.
The British press referred to Blackleach Burritt as that "most pestiferous rebel priest and preacher of sedition".
I., of Washington Irving's Biography, and reference is made to the fact in the Burritt Family Record.
[26] In 1792 he began to preach to the Congregational Society in the village of Winhall, Vermont, where he was installed pastor on January 1, 1793.