Samuel Ingalls

From the Hyten family archive; subject is Samuel Ingalls (1703–1736), a 9× great-grandparent of the compiler in the paternal-grandmother (PM) line. This entry covers his birth at Ipswich in colonial Massachusetts, parentage, marriage to Sarah Hannah Fellows, his daughter Ruth, and his later removal to the Maine frontier at Buxton. Notable: early-eighteenth-century New England colonial settler whose life bridged Essex County and the District of Maine.

Samuel Ingalls (1703–1736) was born about the year 1703 in Ipswich, Essex County, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. He came into the world in one of the oldest and most established towns of coastal New England, a community already nearly a century old at the time of his birth and long associated with the seafaring, farming, and meetinghouse life characteristic of Essex County. His mother is recorded as Sarah Thompson Ingalls (1671–1724), who survived into Samuel's adulthood and would have known him as a grown man before her death.

The early eighteenth century in which Samuel came of age was a period of steady expansion northward and eastward from the older Massachusetts settlements, as families pressed into the District of Maine in search of land along its rivers and inland townships. Samuel's own life followed this pattern of migration. He married Sarah Hannah Fellows, and from this union came at least one recorded daughter, Ruth Ingalls (1719–1754), who carried the family line forward into the next generation.

Samuel's recorded death occurred after 1736 in Buxton, York County, Maine — then a frontier township in a region only recently opened to English settlement and still subject to the hazards of remote coastal and inland life. That he ended his days in Buxton, while having begun them in Ipswich, illustrates in miniature the broader northward drift of Essex County families into Maine during the first half of the eighteenth century. He died comparatively young, in his early thirties, leaving his widow and his daughter Ruth to carry on.

Though the surviving record of Samuel's life is brief, his place in the family lineage is secure. Samuel Ingalls was the compiler's 9× great-grandfather on the paternal-grandmother (PM) line.