Early Life
He was born in the village of Ancrum, near Jedburgh, in the County of Roxburgh, Scotland, one of seven children of the Reverend John Livingston, a lineal descendant of the fourth Lord Livingston, ancestor of the earls of Linlithgow and Callendar, a minister of the Church of Scotland, who was sent into exile in 1663 due to his resistance to attempts to turn the Presbyterian national church into an Episcopalian institution. The exiled family were raised in Rotterdam, in the Dutch Republic, thus Robert Livingston was fluent in the Dutch language, which helped him greatly in his later career in the former Dutch colony of New Netherland.
Read more about this topic: Robert Livingston The Elder
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