John Gardner (Rhode Island governor)

[3] One of his great grandfathers was Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist minister in Newport, who was severely whipped in Boston for his religious views and activism; and another was Randall Holden who was a supporter of the dissident minister Anne Hutchinson and who signed the Portsmouth Compact establishing the first government in the Rhode Island colony.

[2] Simultaneously with his role as deputy governor, Gardner was also chosen as the colony's sixth chief justice of the Superior Court, a position he held for five years.

One of these was John Sanford, who served briefly as governor of the Rhode Island towns of Portsmouth and Newport, just prior to the reunification of the colony following the Coddington Commission.

Her second husband was Solomon Southwick, the publisher of the Newport Mercury and a prominent advocate for the Patriot cause in the American Revolution.

[8] Most of the given ancestry of Gardner is found in John O. Austin's Genealogical Dictionary of Rhode Island.