Ruth Ingalls

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Ruth Ingalls (1719–1754), an 8× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers her birth in colonial Essex County, her parentage in the Ingalls and Fellows families, her marriage to Jedediah Newhall, her daughter Sarah Molley Newell, and the early-eighteenth-century Massachusetts context. Notable: deep New England colonial roots in Essex County.

Ruth Ingalls (1719–1754) was born on the thirty-first day of January, 1719, at Haverhill in Essex County of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a settlement lying not far from Lynn, where she would eventually pass the remainder of her days. She was the daughter of Samuel Ingalls (1703–1736) and Sarah Hannah Fellows (1704–1765), both of established Essex County stock. The Ingalls name was among the older surnames of the North Shore, the family having taken root in the region during the earliest decades of Puritan settlement, and the Fellows line was likewise long planted in the same coastal county.

The Essex County into which Ruth was born was a settled but still cautious country. The shadow of the Salem trials of 1692 had not yet receded from living memory; the towns of Lynn, Salem, and Haverhill were knit together by meeting house, militia, and trade in fish, timber, and small farming. It was a world in which a young woman's life was patterned closely by the rhythm of the Congregational calendar and the obligations of household and kin. Ruth lost her father Samuel in 1736, when she was but seventeen years of age, and so came of age under the continued care of her mother Sarah, who would survive her by more than a decade.

Ruth was joined in marriage to Jedediah Newhall, of the Newhall family long associated with Lynn. Of their union is recorded a daughter, Sarah Molley Newell, born in 1743, whose remarkable longevity carried the line forward well into the nineteenth century. Ruth herself did not enjoy such length of years. She died on the twenty-second of December, 1754, at Lynn, in Essex County, at the age of thirty-five.

Ruth was the compiler's 8× great-grandmother on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.