Education
Bingham was enrolled at Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts and graduated from Yale University in 1853.
Bingham was enrolled at Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Massachusetts and graduated from Yale University in 1853.
Born in Honolulu, Bingham was the sixth child of early missionary Hiram Bingham I (1789–1869) and Sybil Moseley Bingham (1792–1848). Bingham was ordained a Congregationalist minister in New Haven, Connecticut on November 9, 1856. Nine days later on November 18, Bingham married Clara Brewster in Northampton, Massachusetts.
The newlyweds arrived in Honolulu on April 24, 1857 where they both ministered to the native Hawaiians.
After a brief return to the United States in 1865, they arrived in Honolulu on March 13, 1867 for a stopover en route to the Marquesas Islands. They went through Micronesia and returned to Honolulu again in 1868.
There they settled. Bingham was the first to translate the Bible into Gilbertese, and wrote several hymn books, dictionaries and commentaries in the language of the Gilbert Islands.
From 1877 to 1880, Bingham served as Secretary of the Hawaiian Board and in 1895, Yale University awarded him the Doctorate of Divinity. He died October 25, 1908 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Bingham"s son, Hiram Bingham III, was an explorer who became a United States Senator and (briefly) Governor of Connecticut. Another grandson, Jonathan Brewster Bingham, was a long-time Reform Democratic Congressman from The Bronx from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s.