Governor William Ingersoll

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Governor William Ingersoll (1754–1807), a 6× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his Gloucester, Massachusetts origins, removal to Washington County in the District of Maine, his marriage to Elizabeth Knowles, his son Samuel Nash Ingersoll, and the late-colonial and early-Republic New England era in which he lived.

Governor William Ingersoll, born in 1754 at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and laid to rest on the 28th of August, 1807, at Columbia in Washington County, Maine, occupies a distinguished position in the compiler's paternal-grandmother line, standing as a sixth great-grandparent on that branch of the family.

His birthplace of Gloucester, perched upon Cape Ann on the rugged Massachusetts shore, was in the mid-eighteenth century a thriving seafaring community, its fortunes bound to the cod fishery and the coastal trade. The Ingersoll name had by then long been established in New England, having taken early root in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and to bear the surname in Gloucester in 1754 was to belong to the maritime fabric of pre-Revolutionary coastal Massachusetts. William came of age in the very years that the colonies moved toward independence, his youth and early manhood unfolding against the backdrop of the imperial crises, the Revolutionary War, and the founding of the new Republic.

In the course of his life he removed eastward to the District of Maine, then still a part of Massachusetts, and settled in Columbia within Washington County, the easternmost reaches of New England. That region, in the late eighteenth century, was a frontier of settlement, its forests being opened by families pressing into the lumbering country and the coastal lands along the Down East shore. It was in Columbia that he ended his days in the late summer of 1807, at the age of fifty-three.

He was united in marriage to Elizabeth Knowles, and of their union is recorded a son, Samuel Nash Ingersoll, born in 1784 and surviving to the considerable age of eighty-eight, dying in 1872. Through this son the Ingersoll line was carried forward into the nineteenth century and ultimately into the ancestry of the compiler.

Governor William Ingersoll stands in the family register as a sixth great-grandfather of the compiler upon the paternal-grandmother line.